XCOM 2 Long War 2 Dedicated Thread

[coopasonic]

Game over. Everybody was either in the hospital or inflitrating a mission they would never complete.

I have decided to start over one last time, knowing now that one cannot postpone that assault until the last minute. If I lose again I'm done with this.

If you use intel to boost infil, it will cut that time in half.

[Kraken]

I made an early mistake and rendered my Advent officer when I thought I was autopsying him. Oh well, Advent is a dime a dozen, right? Wrong. I can't for the life of me get another officer body. Everything else is going fine, but the clock is ticking and there's nothing I can do about it without a skulljack. It might already be too late.

If I lose this game because of that dumb mistake, I'm going to be pissed that I never got an opportunity to recover from it.

[coopasonic]

Recovering bodies/stuff is somewhat rare in the game. Any mission you evac out of you aren't getting corpses.... did you notice you evac out of a lot of missions? You want missions that list Enemy Material as a reward. That means you get to bring the bodies home.

[Kraken]

Yeah, I know that. My teams are primed and ready to go. But the game won't give me an opening, and I'm afraid the counter is going to run away from me again while I wait for one.

[Kraken]

Welp, I lost to the invisible timer for the third and final time.

I did finally get the corpse that I needed and made a beeline for the scripted events. Had a 10-man attack team infiltrating the codex coordinates (I assume that's the mission that finally reveals and sets back the timer). They had reached 80% of a 40-day infiltration when the timer went ding. So I only missed it by about a game-week, and only because of that stupid early mistake of rendering the officer corpse that I was supposed to research. When I lost I had a second 8-man team with a skulljack out hunting a codex, another 8-man team ready to go, and various other backup squaddies in havens and training.

As usual, I was doing fine tactically, and strategically in every way except for the timer.

I'm not starting over again. Maybe after a break. Time to go back to Civ 6 for awhile.

[coopasonic]

They had reached 80% of a 40-day infiltration when the timer went ding. So I only missed it by about a game-week

There's your problem right there. A 40 day infil is insane. I know you wanted to be sure, but there are only a few missions where you need a full squad (Alien Base Assault).

[Kraken]

They had reached 80% of a 40-day infiltration when the timer went ding. So I only missed it by about a game-week

There's your problem right there. A 40 day infil is insane. I know you wanted to be sure, but there are only a few missions where you need a full squad (Alien Base Assault).

In retrospect, I could have tried it with eight. I think that infil was around 30 days, so it might have come in just under the timer. But the mission description predicted 38 enemies, and my guys were still in lasers and predator armor. Eight vs. 38 did not sound like good odds and I figured that failing that mission would mean losing the game, so 10 extra days for 2 more squaddies seemed like a good price to pay.

(It just occurred to me that I might have saved right before launching that infil. I should check my oldest save and see if I can retry it with a pared-down squad.)

The real problem IMO is complete absence of feedback about alien progress. It would help to know just how urgently you need to act, rather than just knowing in a general way that you had better hurry.

Assuming that I don't get a do-over from a save, I will probably come back to this game in a few weeks for one more try, this time doing that mission as soon as I can unlock it, caution be damned.

[Kraken]

Hah! I DID save right before launching my invasion, and I DID keep that save, so my game is reborn, at least for the moment. I trimmed my squad from 10 dudes to 9 and cut the infil trim from 40 days to, um, 28 I think. If the timer still kills me I can cut it down to 8 and get the infil below 20 days. So, assuming that completing the codex coordinates mission reduces the timer (and displays the freaking thing), this game ain't over yet.

[Kraken]

Last night my nine-man squad lost the race at 88% infil when the aliens drew a "major progress" dark event. This game hates me.

Trying again with an eight-man team tonight. Not real confident in their ability to take out 38 aliens, but at least they ought to get a chance to try before time expires.

[Kraken]

After many reloads I beat that mission and made considerably more progress. Skulljacked a codex, sent Lily's gremlin through the gate, survived the shot-down mission...and then lost to the timer again.

That's it; Long War, you win. I'm done. So I gotta ask: What does it take to make the countdown pips visible in this mod? Or do you ever get to see them? Even if I can't set back the project at will the way I could in vanilla, I'd at least like to watch it beat me. I feel like there must have been a key objective that I missed.

I had just built another power supply and was working on a communications relay to expand my territories beyond 10, just in case being able to see alien facilities was a factor. Maybe the missions that I needed were just outside my LOS?

[coopasonic]

You have to liberate a region to view the avatar progress. There is a variable sequence of missions involved that ends with assaulting an alien base (that's what you need a 10 man squad for). You have to have guys on intel for the region to uncover the missions, then complete them successfully. It starts with a mission that has "find a lead" as a reward, and the subsequent missions are marked as liberation missions.

Basically it sounds like you went wide rather than deep and that's why you never saw the avatar progress.

I would have said something sooner, but I had no idea. Liberating regions was my personal goal anyway and I guess I didn't notice what triggered the avatar project progress to appear.

[Kraken]

Yeah, the "Find a lead" goal never went past "in progress" and I never got a liberation mission -- or at least not that I recognized; if the game had served one up with a very low infil time I would have passed it over. I did own 10 regions and I had at least a couple of guys on Intel in each one. Do you have to lose a region before you can liberate it? Or does the game just pick one that you don't own at random?

Well, that's good to know anyway. I expect to start over in a few weeks.

[coopasonic]

Liberation missions will come up in every region if you have enough guys on intel. You needed more guys on intel. Two won't do it. There is a minimum threshold to have a chance to get the liberation missions and more increases your chances. I don't know the cutoffs, but intel is a top priority in each region early on. It also helps you identify faceless in your people.

[Kraken]

Huh. I thought all it did was add points to your global Intel pool. Guess that explains it.

[Kraken]

Did this mod drop a major update overnight, or is my game suddenly bugged?

Loaded my save and fully half of my guys had promotions due. Not sure, but I think they shuffled the position of some of the promotions in the tree -- all of my doctors now have the unwanted airdrop promotion, and they all lost their field medic (?) promotion -- the one that gives them four heals instead of two. That's a big problem since I build my squads around my docs, and they're all essentially half-strength now.

In the mission that I just quit out of, the "reinforcements incoming" indicator is on, but there's no drop zone marker and the reinforcements apparently aren't arriving. Worse, I can't find the evac zone or call the skyranger.

(edit) Apparently 1.3 just went live on Steam yesterday (?). Trying to figure out now if I need to start a new campaign. Here's a changelog. Wow...that's a lot.

[coopasonic]

You can edit your ini file to make AWC respecs instant to fix up your soldiers.

From Reddit:

Go to the longwar workshop folder and open the XComGameData.ini file. (will be something like \Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\268500\844674609, I think the numbers might be different for others)
Find the follow lines
; This is multiplied per rank!
XComHeadquarters_DefaultRespecSoldierDays[0]=3
XComHeadquarters_DefaultRespecSoldierDays[1]=4; Normal
XComHeadquarters_DefaultRespecSoldierDays[2]=4; Classic
XComHeadquarters_DefaultRespecSoldierDays[3]=5; Impossible
And change every line (or just the one with the difficulty you play at) to say =0 at the end.
This will allow you to put your soldiers into the AWC for respec. As soon as you go onto the world map and time passes they will finish retraining instantly.

There is a post that says you need to go into a config subfolder beyond the path given above, fyi. I am not at home so can't check it.

[Kraken]

I was thinking about starting over anyway. I finally broke into the liberation mission chain, but I still hadn't liberated my first region and it was already mid October. The timer usually runs out in late November, so I was almost surely too late to stop it, especially since all three of my squads were badly dinged up. I felt like I was just running out the clock (again).

In a new game I'll go after that first liberation mission right from the start, as the designers apparently intended. Intel intel intel, and to hell with supplies.

[coopasonic]

Concentrating on supplies early will backfire. First, you draw more attention and second, if you are recruiting and aren't going for enough intel you aren't rooting out infiltrators that are stealing your supplies. It's much safer to liberate a region and then go supply heavy in that region. You get way more supplies from a liberated region.

[Kraken]

The new smash-and-grab missions relieve the early game supply shortage...and they're kind of fun, too. (Ask me again after I've played 20 or 30 of them.) You don't get any corpses, but you do get a modest amount of materiel with little risk.