Feedback from my playthroughs

[Jadiel]

I've played through Long War 2 twice so far, once on Commander and once on Legendary. I didn't make it all the way to the victory screen on Commander, but I reached the point where I was crushing the aliens, and had Coilguns and Warden/WAR armor, researching Plasma (and trying to find Cores to build it with...). On Legendary, I've now reached a similar position (although I don't feel like I'm crushing the aliens quite as hard...). Here's some feedback on my playthroughs:

Firstly, the mod is awesome. I love the Infiltration mechanic and the guerrilla warfare narrative. I love the variety in missions, where I'm sometimes running with 1 or 2 soldiers, and other times with 8-10, sometimes against the clock and sometimes with no time pressure. You've really hit the ball out of the park in terms of changing up the rhythm of the game and stopping it getting boring and monotonous. I really enjoyed a lot of the 'story' missions, like the network tower or the Blacksite, and the upcoming Smash and Grab missions look fun too. I found the timers to be just about right, meaning I was feeling under pressure and sometimes had to take risks, but I never felt they were unfair. The Intervention ability and being able to trade intel for more time is a very elegant balancing mechanic.

I found class balance to be mostly good, although I found it much easier to make Gunners and Sharpshooters shine than Rangers or Assaults. However, this may simply be down to playstyle, and I know from watching the occasional YouTube video that other players have Rangers which carry them through almost every mission. There are (perhaps inevitably) some places where I think one perk dominates other choices in a tree, but they are fairly rare, and I think the pre-release balance team did an amazing job!

I agree with a couple of other people that the UI can be frustrating (having to resort soldiers by Availability every time you select a soldier, the gymnastics you have to do to upgrade a soldiers weapon while transferring their weapon mods to the new weapon, etc), but I think you've already had feedback on that, and actually I didn't find it as bad as other people seem to.

I feel like Legendary could be made a lot harder, especially in the late game. (Unlike some other posters,) I really liked the Dark Events, and the way you could see how the aliens were getting better (if everyone is going to get +1hp, it's nice to know before you go out on the mission - DEs even give you a couple of weeks warning to get your next tier of weaponry ready!). It's fun being able to counter DEs, and it makes for interesting decisions to occasionally be thrown a mission which has rewards which cause you to think about the game and your strategic objectives in a slightly different way. However, I found that my soldiers were outscaling the aliens, and as the game went on, the difficulty went down.

However, this could also be due to my other big complaint: Supply Raids and Troop Columns meant I was swimming in Resources. It's way too easy (once you get ahead of the aliens) to go in with 10 soldiers at 0% infiltration and kill ~50 aliens. Once you can handle an 8-pod, whether there are 3,4 or 5 8-pods makes little difference to difficulty. 0% inf means that the mission costs you very little in terms of soldier time, you get loads of corpses, resources and experiences and it trivialises the Strategic side of the game. I think there needs to be some punishing mechanic which makes 0% infiltration extremely scary, but I don't know what levers you have at your disposal. I guess the easiest solution is to not allow players to launch missions at less than 50% inf, but this seems very inelegant. You could add a timer, and reduce the number of turns players have to complete the mission, which would reduce the power of 'Sit here on overwatch until the enemy stumbles into my vision (possibly while squadsight assassinating them)", but I like that some missions don't have a timer. Can you change the pod placement or behaviour based on infiltration level? If so, I think the best solution is probably to drop players foolish enough to go in at 0% infiltration in the middle of all the pods on the map, as even in my current gamestate that would lead to a squadwipe. Clearly as infiltration rises, you revert pod behaviour to the way it is at the moment, but if you go in with no preparation at all, then you just have to fight all the aliens at once.

Finally, I think that stealth missions are too easy (on Legendary, maybe a little bit on Commander?) This is true at the beginning of the game, but as Shinobis level up (particularly once they get Conceal), it trivialises certain mission types. I think the best solution is probably to boost spotting distances on Legendary. On my current playthrough, I got the Vigilance DE active early on, and it really makes a huge difference to the difficulty of stealth missions. I feel like Vigilance-active spotting distances should be the base-line for Legendary, as they increase the challenge considerably. I'm not sure what it would be like if Vigilance was also active (I suspect it would make early game stealth missions almost impossible), but I think it would improve the game to have stealth be more challenging, and make fighting more of a viable option (at the moment, stealth is a much better choice for a lot of mission types). Perhaps couple this with increased timers on some or all missions?

Thanks once again for all your hard work on the mod - I will enjoy playing it for a long time I think!

[redsky14]

"I feel like Legendary could be made a lot harder, especially in the late game. "

"Finally, I think that stealth missions are too easy"

Do you play Ironman? I play on C - Ironman and 3-4 my really good Shinobis died on Ironman on stealth M. Its easy if you savescum. Few times i opened the doors of jail and advent was inside those doors.. Dead. Even worse, hostige couldnt got out of the door because Advent was blocking doors.

Also, Legendary - do you play Ironman ? Try real game, with ironman.. im stuck on commander and i lost my 1st squad on first tower mission. i know im doing something wrong, but they are 2 powerfull. Btw i won on LW1 , so i am exp player. Just this is totally diffrent beast.

[GavinRuneblade]

Few times i opened the doors of jail and advent was inside those doors.. Dead. Even worse, hostige couldnt got out of the door because Advent was blocking doors. .

Prisons are the UFO control room doors of lw2. Its like back in the original where you had rookies in every mission specifically to open the UFO door and soak up the five or six plasma shots.

[Raven496]

Few times i opened the doors of jail and advent was inside those doors.. Dead. Even worse, hostige couldnt got out of the door because Advent was blocking doors. .

Prisons are the UFO control room doors of lw2. Its like back in the original where you had rookies in every mission specifically to open the UFO door and soak up the five or six plasma shots.

zomg....memories...

[JackDT]

However, this could also be due to my other big complaint: Supply Raids and Troop Columns meant I was swimming in Resources. It's way too easy (once you get ahead of the aliens) to go in with 10 soldiers at 0% infiltration and kill ~50 aliens. Once you can handle an 8-pod, whether there are 3,4 or 5 8-pods makes little difference to difficulty. 0% inf means that the mission costs you very little in terms of soldier time, you get loads of corpses, resources and experiences and it trivialises the Strategic side of the game. I think there needs to be some punishing mechanic which makes 0% infiltration extremely scary, but I don't know what levers you have at your disposal. I guess the easiest solution is to not allow players to launch missions at less than 50% inf, but this seems very inelegant. You could add a timer, and reduce the number of turns players have to complete the mission, which would reduce the power of 'Sit here on overwatch until the enemy stumbles into my vision (possibly while squadsight assassinating them)", but I like that some missions don't have a timer. Can you change the pod placement or behaviour based on infiltration level? If so, I think the best solution is probably to drop players foolish enough to go in at 0% infiltration in the middle of all the pods on the map, as even in my current gamestate that would lead to a squadwipe. Clearly as infiltration rises, you revert pod behaviour to the way it is at the moment, but if you go in with no preparation at all, then you just have to fight all the aliens at once.

Interesting observation, in joinnrbs latest run he also found Supply Raids crazy good and put in a house rule that he isn't allowed to do Supply Raids that are less than 50% infiltrated. This dramatically reduces the number that you can do. I think his suggestions were more along the lines of nerfing the rewards, and moving them to other missions types to increase incentives to play different types.

Finally, I think that stealth missions are too easy (on Legendary, maybe a little bit on Commander?) This is true at the beginning of the game, but as Shinobis level up (particularly once they get Conceal), it trivialises certain mission types.

It's hard for Conceal not to break the game. Long War 2 does a good job with it but it's still ridiculously good. The enemies need battle scanners or something.

[Olin]

Jadiel, maybe you just got crazy good at this game if Legendary is too easy for you As others already asked, did you do Ironman/Honestman ?

I know I am not touching Legendary so I don't really care how difficult it is. However, I wouldnt like the LW to get more difficult in general. I already find it very challenging on veteran. I am not able to easily manage supply raid mid game when more enemies with AOE show up, for example.

Also, did you play with red fog on/off? I believe that turning the red fog off ups the difficulty as usually it is the aliens that get hit and have debuffs.

[aimlessgun]

Once you can handle an 8-pod, whether there are 3,4 or 5 8-pods makes little difference to difficulty.

Well, it does because multipulls are still dangerous. You can still get into bad spots on swarming supply raids because they have seven 8 pods. Once ADVENT's minumum trooper HP is 15 (October in my game), it actually becomes fairly challenging to clear out a big pull in a timely manner, especially if the shieldbearers put up shields on their yellow alert action which they really love to do.

However I guess the missions are still 'easy' in the sense that I'm not going to squadwipe, period (at least once you have high rank soldiers and decent armor). Worst case is a ton of dudes get wounded, with a tiny chance of unlucky crits killing a guy. And you do definitely end up swimming in resources later on, especially Supply (I actually managed to run out of Elerium Crystals recently though).

[Jadiel]

One more thing I should have put in the initial post - Incendary Grenades are too good. If flamethrower doesn't get a 100% chance of burning, neither should grenades...

Jadiel, maybe you just got crazy good at this game if Legendary is too easy for you As others already asked, did you do Ironman/Honestman ?

No, I don't play on Ironman. Partly because this is a beta, and I want to be able to make save games so I can bug report. And partly because I'm still learning the game, and I like being able to restart missions occasionally when I feel like I completely misunderstood mechanics. I play with Red Fog off.

I know I am not touching Legendary so I don't really care how difficult it is. However, I wouldnt like the LW to get more difficult in general. I already find it very challenging on veteran. I am not able to easily manage supply raid mid game when more enemies with AOE show up, for example.

I feel I've come across all wrong in my OP. My intention was not to come into the thread going 'I am awesome at this game, it's really easy, the rest of you are scrubs'. I'm not very good at LW2. I wasn't very good at LW1 either. I found Impossible to be too hard, though I really enjoyed playing on Commander. And that's kind of my point. I can play Legendary on LW2, and it doesn't feel hard enough. I think the reason is stealth missions. If you're fighting the aliens, then Legendary is a lot harder than Veteran or Commander, because the aliens all have better stats. But if you're doing stealth missions, then (as long as something doesn't go wrong) Legendary is no more difficult than lower difficulties. And, especially early game, there are *a lot* of stealth missions. I think if you're playing on a higher difficulty level, then all the missions should be harder, not just the combat ones.

Once you can handle an 8-pod, whether there are 3,4 or 5 8-pods makes little difference to difficulty.

Well, it does because multipulls are still dangerous. You can still get into bad spots on swarming supply raids because they have seven 8 pods. Once ADVENT's minumum trooper HP is 15 (October in my game), it actually becomes fairly challenging to clear out a big pull in a timely manner, especially if the shieldbearers put up shields on their yellow alert action which they really love to do.

However I guess the missions are still 'easy' in the sense that I'm not going to squadwipe, period (at least once you have high rank soldiers and decent armor). Worst case is a ton of dudes get wounded, with a tiny chance of unlucky crits killing a guy. And you do definitely end up swimming in resources later on, especially Supply (I actually managed to run out of Elerium Crystals recently though).

Yeah, that's been my experience also. I apologise for my hyperbole. Obviously 40 enemies are harder than 24, and multipulls are definitely a thing. My point was basically that I don't think 0% infiltration missions were really an intended design goal. You're supposed to be making trade-offs between squad size and difficulty. Ideally, you should be agonizing over whether to bring that 8th (or whatever) guy, because 8 guys are better than 7, but it also makes the mission harder. At the moment, the calibration is just way out-of-whack, and there's no deliberation. More soldiers is almost always the right answer, unless you're trying to stealth it. So combat=bring as many soldiers as possible, stealth= bring as few as you can get away with, with nothing in the middle. If you can calibrate low inf missions, so that 0% inf is suicide, and make stealth missions more challenging, so that there's an incentive to fight on extraction missions, then I think choosing squad size becomes a lot more interesting.

ETA: One more thing - I enjoyed the discussion of disposable rookies. I spent a lot of time playing TftD, and I went into pretty much every early game mission planning to lose half my squad, and being very surprised if I brought more than 75% home with me. Post-reboot, this was something I always felt was missing from XCOM. The casualties just never seemed high enough. LW fixed this to a degree, but even my most bloody LW1 playthroughs had 20-30 deaths. But in LW2, I find myself using disposable rookies again! 10 supplies for a one-use mimic beacon (that sometimes works for 2 turns with a flashbang) is a pretty good tradeoff, and often worth the extra infiltration cost on extraction/assassination missions. I can't load them up with pre-primed grenades like I used to, but they're mostly for stealth missions, so maybe that's no bad thing!

[DuskNite]

Suggestion to nerf 0% Supply Raid/Troop Column.

Clearing any SR at less than 50% permanently increases the troop Vigilance at the area by 2. (You just wiped out an alien army. They should be more alerted to you). Also, the aliens will send higher tier troops earlier in the whole campaign. This includes both troop types and troop tiers.

This means that clearing 0% raids gives massive plus, but also a massive minus, in the sense that every mission after is going to be harder. You can keep on doing it, and it's going to get even harder even faster. We can even incorporate the Permenent Dark Events with this. If you clear a 0% supply raid (0-49%), the aliens will create up to 3 permanent DEs and 1 non-permanent DE.

(A minor penalty should also be applied for between 50 and 75% infiltration. Maybe 1 perma DE, 1 non-perma DE, and a slight boost to overall troop strength)

[wei270]

ok i think like they said those stealth mission and 0% infiltration supply raids that seems easy is because of our ability to safe and load.

when you play on iron man it is a difference story, as unlucky random factors can get your team killed, and losing your best team is a risk you simply can't not take. Because there is not enough guys to replace them, and there is no time to level the guys back up again before the alien out pace you, and worst of all there is no supplies to replace the equipment lost.

when you play on iron man you really have to think about those 0% supply raid and stealth mission, for example if your starting your supply raid close to and in between two alien pods and once of them move in on your to force the fight, then you are facing a real possibility of losing your team, and you can't evac in time because you are on 0% inf evac penalty.

as for the stealth mission i am sure all of all of us safe and loaded them more then once, and as for those doing iron man stealth mission on you tube, they don't do it unless they have 1 or 2 turn evac timer. of course when you do 2 man stealth mission you can get those evac timer as long as you have 5 days so that is a different issue to discuss.

so my points is we need to balance the game from the perspective of iron man mode, and not take in to account the ability to safe and load, because that is actually a form of cheating.

[Gorgon]

I've played twice, lost twice. On my third playthrough is about to go the same way. I never found any alien facilites beyond the plot ones, the blacksite and forge missions and so on. I found and liberated a region but that only gave me supplies and I just rather uninterestingly ran out of time. I usually crank the difficulty all the way down to rookie until I have most of the facilities built as well as mag weapons and basic armor, that also gives me a nice experience boost so I have a chance when it starts to get hard.

It's just hard to get involved when you are running out the clock without any options. Still had a lot of fun with the missions though.

[3tamatulg]

People have been doing those supply raids on Ironman. Watch joinrbs on youtube, he shows us one.

I think the problem, as pointed out by others, is that it's all-or-nothing in supply raids, but they're really needed as a source of corpses. Either you can do them and it makes the game easier, or you can't and the game is much harder for you than for others.

It's also that the mechanic designed to punish you for doing them with a low level of infiltration (more aliens) also increases the reward for doing them. So it's hyperbolic.

What there needs to be is another mechanism for punishing you doing swarming which isn't more aliens. At the same time, if you make it something like "aliens get harder for the rest of the game", you just erase the incentive to do it in the first place (to put yourself ahead of the aliens), and may as well just have a hard cap for minimum infiltration.

So here's some brainstorming for mechanisms to rein in the hyperbolic nature of the rewards to these missions:

- Swarming causes aliens to leave behind fewer and fewer corpses.
- You pay intel/supplies for each piece of loot to be recovered, with diminishing returns (i.e. a hyperbolic cost function determined by how much you're taking in total) (would require 'loot receipt' UI+mechanic to be programmed)
- Selling corpses on the black market has diminishing returns. Maybe the first corpse sells for quite a lot, and then after that there's a big dropoff in what you get for each one.

[wei270]

yeah people do do it in iron man but to a far lesser extent then those without iron man. where in non iron man you are hitting almost every single one of them.

but i do agree the more body = more reward thing is a bit of problem. maybe we can just lower the reward by percentile from the mission relative to infiltration percentile to compensate for it. said if you are running the mission with 0% infiltration you get a 50% penalty to all reward that decrease logarithmicly with higher infiltration, and maybe even increase the reward for those supply raids that magically has over 100% infiltration

[Nagul]

I'm playing in veteran ironman and can confirm that 0% raid are way too easy compared to rewards. Most of the time I do them flawlessly, the worst I got so far was 2 soldiers lightly injured.

The main problems with 0% raid :

- Insanely high rewards : corpses are often worth way much than what you are raiding for in the first place (supplies/alloys/elerium).
- Since you are doing it at 0%, it doesn't lock away your A-team for a time like an HQ assault does for example.
- Breaks totally the whole "sneaky resistance doing tactical strikes" trope. It should be a desperate attempt to get needed resources, a suicide mission that you hope will save your campaign. Not a mission you are happy to do because you know it will insanely boost you.

I don't think preferring to do it at 0% when you have enough remaining time to do it at 100% is how the game is supposed to be played. Higher infiltration should always be a benefit you pay by investing soldier-time.

Lower infiltration should rise the quality of enemies instead of their numbers. Higher versions, more likely of gaining perks thanks to DE, "vigilance bonii" giving them +aim/+def/+dodge or additional chance of yellow moves on activation (after all, you just came gun blazing, they know you are here). Making low infiltration doable BUT removing the incentive of doing them with as low infiltration as possible. This way, you have the same rewards at 0% than at 100% and you can effectively ask yourself if this 10th soldier is worth his slot.

[nightwyrm]

So...why is 0% Supply Raid a problem but I don't hear any complains about 0% Troop Columns? Do people do those at 0% as well? Or is there some factor which makes those different?

[Nagul]

So...why is 0% Supply Raid a problem but I don't hear any complains about 0% Troop Columns? Do people do those at 0% as well? Or is there some factor which makes those different?

I can only speak for myself, but I don't differentiate troop columns and supply raid missions, as I feel the only remarkable difference between those is the map layout (and their trigger condition). I also do troop columns at 0%. Assume everything said about supply raids apply to troop columns.

[brunodema]

Suggestion to nerf 0% Supply Raid/Troop Column.

Clearing any SR at less than 50% permanently increases the troop Vigilance at the area by 2. (You just wiped out an alien army. They should be more alerted to you). Also, the aliens will send higher tier troops earlier in the whole campaign. This includes both troop types and troop tiers.

This means that clearing 0% raids gives massive plus, but also a massive minus, in the sense that every mission after is going to be harder. You can keep on doing it, and it's going to get even harder even faster. We can even incorporate the Permenent Dark Events with this. If you clear a 0% supply raid (0-49%), the aliens will create up to 3 permanent DEs and 1 non-permanent DE.

(A minor penalty should also be applied for between 50 and 75% infiltration. Maybe 1 perma DE, 1 non-perma DE, and a slight boost to overall troop strength)

One other option would be to change the "impregnable" status (the usual infiltration level at 0%): make it so all pods start active or in yellow alert + higher detection ranges.

[JulianSkies]

Balance of rewards aside I really hope that they don't make 0% supply raids unfeasible or undesirable in any way, those missions are immensely fun, they are the kind of firefight that I wish every mission on the game was. Even from a narrative standpoint it makes sense, you're supposed to win this rebellion at some point, at some point the desperate guerrilla takes the upper hand and becomes the army, this is that point.

But overall I just love how they play and don't want them to become a bad choice at all. I mean sure,a bad choice when you don't have the troops and gear for it, yeah, but otherwise, all still a good idea.

[Jadiel]

I think I said in the OP, but my suggested solution would be that instead of scaling up the number of enemies on the map as infiltration approaches 0%, you bring the location of the pods closer to your start zone. So if you go in at 0%, all the aliens on the map know you're coming, and they will be standing ready to greet you at your spawn point.

Of course, you may look and think "A Light Supply Raid - I can kill 14 aliens with 10 soldiers" and go in at 0%, and that's fine. If it's a Heavy supply Raid though, you might be less keen on having 25-30 activating on your first turn. I think this fits the fluff really well, and means that rewards scale with the investment, while also increasing the risk. You face interesting decisions of bringing 8 men at 50% vs 6 at 100% (do you want all the aliens concentrated in one quadrant of the map? Can you maybe sneak past them into a less populated part and deal with them more easily?)