XCOM V5: Grazed shots still count as hits - Games

Just started my first alien base mission in LW (EW), scared as hell because I'm hearing an Ethereal pod. Never faced one in LW before. First pod, an all-mech one (dual disks), went down almost without a hitch however. Haven't played further yet. Is it normal for base pods to get actions on activation? The disks both got to take shots on my Shogun upon activation.

Should I have upgraded armor/weapons by the time I start seeing the likes of Advanced Officers in LW2? One of them managed to one-shot my technical, I feel like I'm unprepared

[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;51740168]I actually was but it didn't look too good on that particular outfit. Seriously guys I installed literally every armor, weapon, skin, country, voice, and hat mod I could find for this game.[/QUOTE] Bit late on this, so did I, only problem is that my PC couldn't run the vanilla game at more than 5fps, so the mods didn't really help much! Once I get my new PC built (And Play GTA V and Fallout 4) I'm going to go through the game with long war and as many mods as I can run, it's gonna be great.

I decided to get OG X-COM from the Humble Store, since I'm a pretty big fan of Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2. I've beaten the former on Classic Ironman and the latter on Veteran Ironman. First mission on Beginner, lost 6 rookies. :suicide: [sp]At least it wasn't a squadwipe...[/sp]

[QUOTE=Im Crimson;51754628]Just started my first alien base mission in LW (EW), scared as hell because I'm hearing an Ethereal pod. Never faced one in LW before. First pod, an all-mech one (dual disks), went down almost without a hitch however. Haven't played further yet. Is it normal for base pods to get actions on activation? The disks both got to take shots on my Shogun upon activation.[/QUOTE] Base defense aliens get Itchy Trigger Tentacle, to simulate them overwatch camping, just like you would on base defense.

Some of the evasion values in LW2 are a bit absurd. Like, I don't mind it so much with the snakes, but all the late-game Advent Officers are such a bitch to take down that I usually end up spamming grenades when there's one I want gone.

[QUOTE=Kierany9;51755262]I decided to get OG X-COM from the Humble Store, since I'm a pretty big fan of Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2. I've beaten the former on Classic Ironman and the latter on Veteran Ironman. First mission on Beginner, lost 6 rookies. :suicide: [sp]At least it wasn't a squadwipe...[/sp][/QUOTE] Judging by what ive seen of people playing, you need a few rookies each mission to act as meatbags as to tank the aliens overwatch shots from you just leaving the skyranger.

[QUOTE=Kierany9;51755262]I decided to get OG X-COM from the Humble Store, since I'm a pretty big fan of Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2. I've beaten the former on Classic Ironman and the latter on Veteran Ironman. First mission on Beginner, lost 6 rookies. :suicide: [sp]At least it wasn't a squadwipe...[/sp][/QUOTE] Seems you're doing good. Losing rookies is something you'll be doing practically every other mission. Though it's incredibly easy to lose experienced soldiers as well from a bad Skyranger spawn. That's what I like about the original XCOM; aliens have vastly superior stats and equipment and every single one of them is active from the start of the mission, leaving you feeling truly outgunned and desperate.

Make sure to build a rocket tank ASAP in UFO Defense

[QUOTE=Destroyox;51756496]Make sure to build a rocket tank ASAP in UFO Defense[/QUOTE] This, so you can destroy cover. Also bringing a few rocket launchers may save you. And remember high explosives make for great grenades once you get a few soldiers with enough strength.

It isn't X-COM until you demolish every building on the map!

[QUOTE=bloboo;51757470]I always liked imagining that the reason XCOM lost the first war wasn't cause they just couldn't keep the aliens back, but Council member nations were like "Can you stop fucking blowing up literally everything? The aliens were just killin people but you leveled the entire city block!" and XCOM is just like "Can't hear you, testing some new grenades out rn" so the nation just withdraws cause they'd like to keep their city skylines. I mean shock and awe is my fav strat so[/QUOTE] In this context, why doesn't the Resistance just outright stop supporting XCOM when they figure out in the monthly report the amount of civilians that were killed by explosives, flamethrowers, and exposure to biological weapons?

[QUOTE=DBFT;51757503]In this context, why doesn't the Resistance just outright stop supporting XCOM when they figure out in the monthly report the amount of civilians that were killed by explosives, flamethrowers, and exposure to biological weapons?[/QUOTE] Because that's obviously just pro-Advent propaganda! Our glorious Xcom soldiers are doing everything they can to avoid any unnecessary deaths. People killed during our operations can die knowing that their death was a necessary part of liberating Earth from this alien menace! EDIT: Well this is great, I just lost my shinobi after he got hit by a 9%, 22% and 20% shots in a row. Apparently the AI got tired of me spamming flashbangs and decided to 'randomly' roll some shots against my troops.

So would you guys say LW2 is more fair than LW1? I had always gotten the impression from people that LW1 was really phenomenally bullshit, but was that just because people were playing on impossible difficulty? After all, it seems to me that LW2 on Veteran is generally pretty fair, with only rare exceptions like unintuitive infiltrator mechanics.

[QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;51757998]So would you guys say LW2 is more fair than LW1? I had always gotten the impression from people that LW1 was really phenomenally bullshit, but was that just because people were playing on impossible difficulty? After all, it seems to me that LW2 on Veteran is generally pretty fair, with only rare exceptions like unintuitive infiltrator mechanics.[/QUOTE] Long War 2 suffers mostly from lack of explanation (infiltration, haven management, etc) more than integral problems. It still has those, that said. The balance is a little wonky in stages, and I can't seem to get the gist of the overworld because I feel like my second run is skimming my teeth on AVATAR's completion. My first I had to give up due to it. I wish that it was a feature you could simply turn off, because the long and grueling pace of everything else really doesn't need a looming doomsday timer on top. I barely remember the AVATAR project being a threat in vanilla, but here it's a constant "your 40 hour campaign may be irreparably damaged ;)" state of bleh. Infiltrations change the game up in a mixed way. It creates many more internal choices you have to run through which is radical, but the upper limit on 20-50+ days to infiltrate bases gets rather silly. It could be entirely that I'm just bad though. UNRELATED: [t]http://i.imgur.com/Rf3gmX9.jpg[/t] I'm so low on soldiers now that I'm just sending out random people and rookies and I think the last guy went out with a generic ballistic gun and I already have plasma researched. I legitimately have no idea where anyone or any gear is except my star squad is infiltrating the site. Pretty sure there's a GREMLIN with a knife duct-taped to it out at one of those other missions. UNUNRELATED: Had a mission I had to sacrifice two low-ranking peeps by having them draw all the fire out so that the last and only could escape with the objective. [t]http://i.imgur.com/HRWjy6A.jpg[/t] [URL="http://i.imgur.com/c9bFH6G.jpg"]I was not ready for how heavy the loading screen would be.[/URL]

[QUOTE=CGNick;51755276]Base defense aliens get Itchy Trigger Tentacle, to simulate them overwatch camping, just like you would on base defense.[/QUOTE] Nice. Not a terribly accurate simulation I'd say, since it seems Lightning Reflexes doesn't trigger. Scout took a load of dual plasma in the face before I figured that out. Seems like the only way of working around this is to use concealment scouts or tanks and then make sure to activate in such a way that they are unlikely to have vision to your target tile. Talk about keeping players on their toes :v: EDIT: The pods themselves have been somewhat reasonable so far, at least. Only 6 aliens compared to 7 for the landed abductors.

Managed to play around 10 missions of LW2 now. Havnt developed too much more of an in depth opinion yet as i've only just started to encounter mutons. However i have some ideas / changes i'd personnally like to see. I like the infiltraition mechanic, but i think i'd like bonuses based entirely around information. The idea being that we're sending squads in to prepare for a mission istead of just turning up and blitzing the joint right of the bat. Thats where i think for every 50% infiltraition, you get mission intel. at 50%, you see the entire map including the security towers. for route planning, but not the enemies or civilians. at 100% you get to know exactly how many enemies are in the AO. Going in blind especially now we're spending days setting up just seems wrong. Misson timers, i'm getting by atm but it's starting to grate and I can feel a mission is gonna end in failiure soon because of it. Iv'e gone on a couple of missions now where iv'e had to spend 3 turns getting off the initial roof, heading in the wrong direction from the objective and EVAC, i've had a mission where I only had 1 exit of a roof and it was right into a civilian tile which was just dandy and then most recently I had a mission where my troops could not jump through a building window or down from the roof, meaning they had to head back and around the building wasting 3 turns of the 4 I had left. I'm not finding it nail biting or risky, i'm sitting here thinking fuck you game for using the map parcels to get me killed not the damn enemies. Personally i'd rather have waves of Advent reinforcements arrive, but not infront or on top of your squad, they come from where you started and chase you out. And lastly, the lack of world overview information with how things have changed or what things do on the world map. Advent strength in my starting region for example is starting to rise which I can only imagine is a bad thing. But I have no idea why it's bad, does it mean i'll see harder enemies in missions? perhaps more enemies?, does it mean infiltration timers will be cut shorter too or does it mean the resistance outpost will be hit in a retalliation mission? Havent got a clue. I noticed I could send the resistance members there into hiding so iv'e done that but I have no idea if it'll slowly reset the strength down, or have that build of of Advent force slowly move to another region where i'm kicking the nest. And then the Avatar Project, yeah I decidedly do not like feeling that my entire campaign can end without knowing it because i have no idea if im behidn the curve or not, especially as i have yet to see any kind of mission to set it back as well or even if such a thing exists. There's so many little things where the lack of information if a pain in the arse. Enemy abilities are fine i don't need or want to know those up front.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/tPTOapf.png[/img] Regional HQs are no joke. By the time I got to the last pack of 7 enemies, I was running on fumes. Half my squad knocking on death's door, only a single flashbang left and everything else used (grenades, flamethrower, rockets, medkits etc). Luckily the last pack was inside a building when I aggroed them so they couldn't spread over a very large area. This meant I could lock down all of them with two Area Suppressions and just take potshots from behind high cover while my ranger flanked them. Still, with the odds stacked for me like that, I almost lost my squad leader thanks to the ridiculously high aim stat of the Advent General.

I got some questions about lw2, because i think my game is bugged: did they removed avatar project countdown? because on my campaign it never showed, but suddenly i got the campaign defeat video and message when i was doing a scan. there is a countdown if you take too long to do main story missions? did they changed the main story missions sequence? i never got Blacksite vial and coordinates missions. but got codex skulljack and coordinates missions. noticed some other bugs with research: psyonics never appear to me util i cleared .ini files killed beserk queen but got no autopsy

[QUOTE=C4rnage;51785380]I got some questions about lw2, because i think my game is bugged: did they removed avatar project countdown? because on my campaign it never showed, but suddenly i got the campaign defeat video and message when i was doing a scan. there is a countdown if you take too long to do main story missions? did they changed the main story missions sequence? i never got Blacksite vial and coordinates missions. but got codex skulljack and coordinates missions. noticed some other bugs with research: psyonics never appear to me util i cleared .ini files killed beserk queen but got no autopsy[/QUOTE] The Avatar project is always running, you only reveal it once you liberate your first region.

[QUOTE=cyclocius;51785453]The Avatar project is always running, you only reveal it once you liberate your first region.[/QUOTE] and how you liberate a region?

[QUOTE=C4rnage;51785647]and how you liberate a region?[/QUOTE] It's a quest-chain. You know how a lot of Guerrilla actions have the reward of "Find a lead"? That's the first step, then you do another few missions (typically rescue a VIP), which progresses the quest chain until you get an objective to "Find the regional tower" or something. This is a mini-assault on a Tower that I'm told is quite hard (I'm infiltrating to do it now), and after that you get the Base Assault which is a slaughter. Doing the Base Assault and completing it liberates the region, though apparently Advent can try to take it back at a later date.

So I just finished my first HQ Assault in long war and I got the mission from Shen's Last Gift. Thing is I beat that mission earlier in the campaign, I'm wondering if it's a bad idea to exploit the mission to get another spark unit

[QUOTE=warmarine;51787953]So I just finished my first HQ Assault in long war and I got the mission from Shen's Last Gift. Thing is I beat that mission earlier in the campaign, I'm wondering if it's a bad idea to exploit the mission to get another spark unit[/QUOTE] I think you have an obligation to exploit every weakness the enemy has.

ive been watching a LW2 lp are you supposed to leave an important mission if you cant infiltrate or send a big team and use brute force?

[QUOTE=waylander;51793732]ive been watching a LW2 lp are you supposed to leave an important mission if you cant infiltrate or send a big team and use brute force?[/QUOTE] Depends on how important it is. I ignored Liberation sequence starter a couple of times in my campaign, nothing bad happened. In general I find it fitting to think of LW Guerilla and "Council" ops not as missions but rather as "opportunities" and those can be exploited or not, depends on whether the reward is worth it.

I tried to run a mission at 50% infiltration and the bullshit was so thick that i had seconds thoughts about continuing the playthrough, it was "extremely light" but i had non-stop reinforcements that fucking [i]psi-teleported[/i] literally on top on my stacked squad. How's that shit going to be fair if you get elite mechs spawning on your face late game ? The amount of grazes or just pitiful shots when flanking was ridiculous too, as if the enemies psionically exiting my asshole weren't enough.

[QUOTE=honestfam;51799417]I tried to run a mission at 50% infiltration...[/QUOTE] Found the problem.

Just started a new Gatecrasher. One of the rookies explodes out of the gate, starts bleeding out, rest of the squad takes damage under their ceramic plates, two more start panicing. Then we all enter concealment. Sounds about par for the course for me and LW2.

[QUOTE=Kierany9;51799834]Found the problem.[/QUOTE] -snipped- because i'm still not sure how the whole reinforcement at objective completion works, but i swear it has nothing to do with infiltration.