XCOM, Long War mod

Has anyone played through XCOM with the Long War mod? I played through the original Enemy Unknown campaign when the game first launched and was looking to revisit the franchise to complete my long ago purchased Enemy Within expansion.

Forego vanilla Enemy Within and mod game with Long War?

I played the Long War mod pre-expansion. It was great but also pretty hard. Also VERY long. I finally stopped after the first alien base raid but even that took at least twice as long as the entire campaign in vanilla mode! I understand the newer versions of the mod have a 'not quite so long' option to bring that down to something a little more attainable.

There was a lot to learn in the Long War mod with all the new classes and figuring out how to deal with having somewhat more soldiers than the map expects. Tossing in the new 'enemy within' features as well will make that even more difficult. I expect it's do-able, though, with some liberal alt-tabbing and internet searching.

Oh - and expect to lose some terror missions. They're an actual TERROR in the Long War!

I have played though long war. It took around 300 hours, however the long war devs have implanted an option to make the game faster in the newer versions. I can highly recommend the mod, it’s one of the best and well developed mods that I have ever played, just be sure to read up on the changes to the game before playing, there is a lot of them.

The ufopaedia site helped me a lot while playing. Having it bookmarked and checking out on things between missions is a good idea. Just jump into the game and start playing though, the best way to learn all the changes is to play. Normal is forgiving enough, even though it doesn’t seem that way when you are first start out. http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Long_War

And remember Xcom isn’t about winning, it’s about surviving long enough to lunch the final mission. Losing 20-50 soldiers and 3-7 counties is standard for a long war play though.

I'm not really into these pain-for-fun mods. I guess I don't feel I have the time to suffer an endless grind to feel good about my performance anymore.

But I appreciate the effort, and I know that a lot of people think an interesting challenge is about how much work you put into winning.

DArtagnan said:

I'm not really into these pain-for-fun mods. I guess I don't feel I have the time to suffer an endless grind to feel good about my performance anymore.

But I appreciate the effort, and I know that a lot of people think an interesting challenge is about how much work you put into winning.

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Well if you played the original Xcom and loved it, Long War is more similar to it than new Xcom. You can have more troops per battle but you lose them more often. Also the Geoscape part of the game is not preset now but aliens have missions each month like in original Xcom and can even set traps for players (like put lots of troops into smaller craft and land and wait for you to go attack them; then you suddenly find out that you have to battle 2x troops than you expected and troops are stronger than expected) but they set traps if your Xcom team is doing really well not randomly just to make the game harder. It is kind of a way for aliens to get back into the fight. Enemy tech goes up through the game depending on how well your team does. If you manage to shoot down many UFOs and clear their ships you will slow down alien tech.

The mod is really intelligently done. And as said before, when starting a new game you turn on the additional option that speeds up the game a bit (I think it is called "Not so Log war" or something similar) and makes air combat a bit easier. With that on the game still takes longer than vanilla but not as long as normal Long War.

The game allows aliens to have more than 1 alien base (and they can only appear in countries that left the council) and you can even lose you base without game over.

There are a huge number of other improvements, it almost feels like another game. Like a better game.

I would disagree that Long War is more like original XCOM, it's a bit more sadistic than that, IMO.

I would however recommend playing with Long War, even if you don't finish the game, because it IS an incredible way to play XCOM, and even if you bail out after getting repeatedly violated you'll still likely get hours and hours of fun out of it. I never finished the game with it but enjoyed it. My brother also played it and hated it because he didn't enjoy the added challenge.

I'd prefer something in the middle - vanilla is too plain, Long War is too over the top.

But Long War adds so much to the game and gameplay and is more in tune with what I wanted in a remake - more depth, more detail, more missions, less on rails, less dumbed down for console peasantry.

But Long War adds so much to the game and gameplay and is more in tune with what I wanted in a remake - more depth, more detail, more missions, less on rails, less dumbed down for console peasantry.

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I would love all these features without the pointless grinding.

Also, I've never enjoyed X-Com with more than 6 soldiers. In fact, I completed the original with 4 guys - which I had from the start of the game.

I think the Long War is incredibly tedious - and I don't really need to immerse myself in a nearly impossible scenario to have fun.

The original X-Com wasn't very hard once you figured it out, because it played fair. Long War is deliberately unfair - and I think that's just stupid.

It doesn't exactly help that the new X-Com system is so binary. You just don't have the arsenal of choice that the original games had - which makes everything much more subject to black and white results due to random chance.

Not a good match for punishing mechanics at all.

It didn't seem unfair to me at all. You get a lot more soldier variety and a couple more units, they get lots more units. It's the classic quality vs. quantity trade off.

I also don't see it as a grind. It's not like I'm doing something boring for a long time just to get to something that's a lot more fun. (Though the map repetition does get annoying - XCom 2 should fix that up.)

Zloth said:

It didn't seem unfair to me at all. You get a lot more soldier variety and a couple more units, they get lots more units. It's the classic quality vs. quantity trade off.

I also don't see it as a grind. It's not like I'm doing something boring for a long time just to get to something that's a lot more fun. (Though the map repetition does get annoying - XCom 2 should fix that up.)

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Fair enough

But according to their very own documentation, the game is meant to be a lot more punishing and focusing on preserving your soldiers is actively counter to the intention of the design.

I suppose if you don't really care too much about your soldiers and their progression, it's more fun.

I've always been very fond of the RPG aspect of X-Com, so I do NOT enjoy losing my progress like that.

But such is how we all differ!

DArtagnan said:

But according to their very own documentation, the game is meant to be a lot more punishing and focusing on preserving your soldiers is actively counter to the intention of the design.

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?? It's definitely more punishing (though I'm not sure how much of that is the game actually being harder and how much of it is the steeper learning curve) but where do you get that preserving your soldiers is counter to the design intent? There's quite a bit of documentation out there so I might have missed it - maybe an Ironman thing? I certainly was getting invested in my characters when I played it.

All this talk of the mod got me to download it again. Jeez, the thing is HUGE! So many classes, so many features, so many nice changes... It's like getting five expansion packs for free!

They've added several factors to an INI file so you can tweak them, too. For instance, you can now adjust the length of the long war to whatever suits you, or set the colors for each class' armor. I gotta go dink around with that one - snipers are PURPLE!

Zloth said:

?? It's definitely more punishing (though I'm not sure how much of that is the game actually being harder and how much of it is the steeper learning curve) but where do you get that preserving your soldiers is counter to the design intent? There's quite a bit of documentation out there so I might have missed it - maybe an Ironman thing? I certainly was getting invested in my characters when I played it.

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Well, I remember reading under the mod description or readme file that you need to accept that you'll lose Soldiers in the beginning.

Couldn't find a direct quote, but the following is an example of their design philosophy:

Q: A really big UFO just landed in my home country in March! How am I supposed to beat that?
A: Basically, you're not (it's possible, though). The aliens have an active strategy now, gathering resources and conducting research and going on other missions not directly related to XCOM's operations. They're going to do their thing, and sometimes you'll cross paths with them when they are doing something they feel is rather important and have brought along a massive force to defend it. The penalties for XCOM aborting that mission early on are usually small, so don't feel obligated to sacrifice your force to win that one.

Q: It's early in the campaign and I just ran into a mission with tons of powerful aliens. How am I supposed to beat that?
A: Again, you're not. Part of the tactical challenge of the mod is to recognize a bad situation and retreat. Of course, later in the game, the aliens' development may outpace yours.

Essentially, the early game is designed so you're meant to lose certain battles.

That's fully realistic and SOME people enjoy that kind of battle - I just don't. It's fine that the penalties for retreating are "small" - but it's very hard to know if you're supposed to retreat until you've actually encountered the enemy, and that means potential losses before running away.

Also, I played it a few times on both Hard and Normal - and I couldn't keep my guys alive to save my life. The RNG and binary X-Com system is just too limited for the kind of tactical approach that usually makes a hard game interesting.

Apparently, the concept of RPG'ing your team isn't really what it's about. It seems to be about a very long war of attrition and economic hardship.

That's much more realistic and plausible, sure, but it's not what I like about these games.

In that same way, I wouldn't enjoy Jagged Alliance 2 if I had to recruit new team members constantly.

I also hate having so many "red shirts" in the begining of a game. It's directly counter to the personal relationship I like forming with my X-Com team. As I said, I don't accept losing a single team member.

They've added several factors to an INI file so you can tweak them, too. For instance, you can now adjust the length of the long war to whatever suits you, or set the colors for each class' armor. I gotta go dink around with that one - snipers are PURPLE!

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I guess I could, but I don't see the rational part about tweaking a mod that sets out to do something to a game that I don't agree with.

I'd rather play around with another mod - or just wait for X-Com 2

You like Long War - and that's cool. I think it's a terrible way to prolong the game, but we all like different things.

Some people enjoy Dark Souls, for instance, and that's similar in how it makes a limited gameplay arsenal into a huge game - simply by being challenging and forcing you to grind until you learn how to avoid grinding - which is pretty much all there is to it. Don't believe me? Enable godmode and experience how limited the actual content really is.

It forces you to adapt to a harsh situation, but it doesn't reward you accordingly. The only reward is the sensation some people seem to get by having "beaten" a completely predictable set of scripts.

To me, that's not worth the effort. I have absolutely no doubt that I can beat every single AI-driven opponent in existence, as long as it doesn't overtly cheat or the game is simple enough to create a truly challenging opponent for, like Chess.

In fact, I think almost all human beings could do that. It's just a matter of time, really.

I need my reward to match my effort - and there's no way I'm going to play essentially the same X-Com game with some added community content if I have to work ten times harder to see it.

That's for other people