Long War rant...

[JamesStone]

So, recently I went back to XCOM with the fantastic mod Long War. It's a very detailed, almost professional level mod inspired by both the original and the new XCOM games, which tries to take the best of both and in general, IMO, manages to do so quite well (Then again, if you clicked the thread you most likely know this. Sorry).

Except one thing. Terror Missions.

Don't get me wrong, I get the whole philosophy of "you can't win every battle". But in every other type of mission, that philosophy is well applied. Squads converge on you, with many different types of pods made by different aliens which sinergise almost perfectly (beware mid-late game Thin Men + Seekers. Choke you out of cover then shoot you dead in one turn with pin-point accuracy, while being the most mobile pod in the game aside from Chryssaspam). The Terror missions, however, are the perfect representation of everything I hate within the mod.

My first campaign (Classic, Ironman) ended before 2015. I got cocky, thought it would be like normal XCOM, and failed. Hard. Let the aliens have shittons of research. Lost when abduction missions started sporting 15HP giant Sectoids regularly. Tough, but fair. I'll play like I did in Vanilla I/I.

This playthrough I was doing pretty darn well. Only lost 3 soldiers in one and a half year, two of them rookies, I'm doing a pretty good squad rotation, research is planned to the milimiter, and for now air dominance is tipped in my favour. Been getting 3-4 Meld per canister Then the first Terror Ship I wasn't able to crash in about 4 months landed and started a mission...

First thing I see when I land is, I shit you not, 80 HP Chryssalid as wide as 4 Chryssas in a line and tall as 5, followed by 9 (YES, BLOODY NINE) of its smaller cousins, which deals 21 damage per attack after DR, with every perk a Chryssalid can have and was able to absord 10 damage of a Kinetic Strike. After the first turn is over, 11 civilians and one of my soldiers are dead, two off-screen. And who decided to show up? EXALT ELITES, SOMEHOW SPORTING 8 MORE HP EACH THAN THE LAST TIME I MADE AN EXALT MISSION, 4 DAYS BEFORE!

It highlitted exactly the bullshit Long War sometimes pulls. Pathetic attemps at "EXTREME!" and "HARDCORE GAMINGZ!!1!" by pulling squad leaders which are stronger than the rest of the squad combined and faulty alien research system which instead of giving rank-and-file aliens good perks and increased squad size simply buffs HP, damage and DR to the point of immersion-breaking disbelief. Which is made worse by the fact it usually pulls off pretty damned well!

Seeing one Mechtoid and two Mutons working together to distract you while two other Floaters attempt to outflank you, essentially putting you between a rock and a hard place, and they were all in the same pod? That's pretty hard but fair, and it was my failures, both on the tactical and strategic side, to allow that to happen. Should have stopped the aliens to get so much research, shouldn't have allowed an opening in my defenses. Simply having a brick wall with legs and a machine gun the size of an Elephant thrown to you because of poorly defined reasons? That's just sad in many different levels.

So I just said "Fuck it!" and for the first time in a long while, I've summoned Heroes. Not just one. Oh no! For that bullshit, I summoned 4 Otto Zanders, one Joe Kelly and one Ken Levine, and just wiped the fuckers off the face of the city.

The kicker? They still killed 14 civilians offscreen and I got about 43 panic on the country plus the continent's bonus, putting a somewhat under control country into "leaving the council" state.

FUCK!

THAT!


Rant off. On a side note, anyone knows how to edit files so dead civies don't increase panic? I want to do the chance just for that mission, fuck that, no way I'm taking it up the ass and not saying anything about it.

PS: Classic, no Ironman, Aiming Angles, Liberator, and some others to increase tactical choice.

 

[CaptainCoxwaggle]

Long War unfortunately is at a long war with XCOM itself and it's many faulty systems. As the game is hardcoded in many places and only hex-editable it is near impossible for casual tweaking (I myself was unable to find a way to tweak gender ratios away from the horrid EU expansion that has made half my soldiers women no matter how many times I restart)

Due to a great many of the perks in XCOM being completely broken (Sniper squadsight made endgame bosses a joke, Close Combat Specialists made Chyssalids completely ineffective). This has forced the Long War team to come up with methods to provide more challenge to the player the old fashioned way with bloated HP and absurd damage.

My only suggestion would be to wait for the development team to come up with some editing tools or mini-mods to address problems, and play Xenonauts instead.

 

[BraveSirRobin]

It sounds like you're in mid 2016 and pretty much at that point losing a terror mission isn't a huge deal given that you can just take the country back straight away with a base assault. Honestly I don't know that I've really bothered with terror missions too much beyond early 2016 purely because I prefer to shoot down the ship or force the country to leave the council if it gets through and just do a base assault to keep the aliens down and grab the huge resource haul from it. Though if you're really a year and a half in you should be pretty damn close to the temple ship assault to just end it, otherwise the aliens must be seriously out of control.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Yeah, I despise some of the cheap ways Long War artificially inflates the difficulty. Luckily the mod is fairly straightforward to edit to your liking.

Rant off. On a side note, anyone knows how to edit files so dead civies don't increase panic? I want to do the chance just for that mission, fuck that, no way I'm taking it up the ass and not saying anything about it.

The file you're looking for is "DefaultGameCore.ini" located in your "XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XEW/XComGame/Config" directory. Search for "PANIC_TERROR_COUNTRY" and change the number value to 0.

As for insane alien HP gain, you can change that along with a bunch of other stats under the "ALIEN AUTOMATIC UPGRADES" section. It is rather tedious though, as there's lots of alien types and ranks to sift through.

 

[JamesStone]

It sounds like you're in mid 2016 and pretty much at that point losing a terror mission isn't a huge deal given that you can just take the country back straight away with a base assault. Honestly I don't know that I've really bothered with terror missions too much beyond early 2016 purely because I prefer to shoot down the ship or force the country to leave the council if it gets through and just do a base assault to keep the aliens down and grab the huge resource haul from it. Though if you're really a year and a half in you should be pretty damn close to the temple ship assault to just end it, otherwise the aliens must be seriously out of control.

Yeah, you're probably right, but it still bothers me a lot to see this huge spike in difficulty which never appeared again (I played an EXALT mission today and the operatives where still with the same health they were before the Terror Mission). It was probably just a bug, but damned if I got mad as all hell.

 

[JamesStone]

Yeah, I despise some of the cheap ways Long War artificially inflates the difficulty. Luckily the mod is fairly straightforward to edit to your liking.

Rant off. On a side note, anyone knows how to edit files so dead civies don't increase panic? I want to do the chance just for that mission, fuck that, no way I'm taking it up the ass and not saying anything about it.

The file you're looking for is "DefaultGameCore.ini" located in your "XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XEW/XComGame/Config" directory. Search for "PANIC_TERROR_COUNTRY" and change the number value to 0.

As for insane alien HP gain, you can change that along with a bunch of other stats under the "ALIEN AUTOMATIC UPGRADES" section. It is rather tedious though, as there's lots of alien types and ranks to sift through.

Thanks for the help, mate. I'm editing it as soon as I can.

 

[SuperDwarf]

I still need to get back into Long War, the only problem I find is that it adds too many new layers without enough explanation.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

I still need to get back into Long War, the only problem I find is that it adds too many new layers without enough explanation.

I read most of the wiki prior to starting, because there are a lot of things that they don't tell you beforehand that are important. The most important things I found are:
-Interceptor repairs takes MUCH longer, so have lots of Interceptors. Also, changing weapons on an interceptor (except for the early missile type weapons) takes about a week (the logic being you need to retrofit the craft to carry lasers, coilguns, etc.)
-The foundry is way more important in LW than in Vanilla X-Com, you need it pretty much immediately.
-Keep capturing aliens, even after you've already interrogated that species. In LW, if you want to build Plasma Weapons, you need to have your own, you can't just build them from scratch, so the more plasma weapons you have laying around when you finally research plasma weapons, the better. Also, keep capturing Outsiders, because you need them to take back lost countries. But be careful, Outsiders are way more dangerous than in vanilla game.
-The Scout class sucks (my opinion).
-Don't sell all your alien surgery's and stasis cells this time around, you'll need them for a very helpful foundry project.
-The grey market is where you make most of your money.
-In LW, there are going to be times when you simply have to ignore missions and let the aliens have it, because the game tends to come in waves (ie. you'll get absolutely slammed with alien activity, and then nothing will happen for a week).