Will the Rookie difficulty get harder?

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TommiH
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Nov 18, 2018 9:58 am

Will the Rookie difficulty get harder?

Post by TommiH »

Hello everyone,

I suffered a miserable defeat in Long War 1 on the Rookie difficulty, so when I started Long War 2, I went for Rookie as well. However, a couple of months into it (still fighting only ADVENT Troopers and Sectoids), I've suffered no losses and taken only a couple of small wounds. There have been a couple of situations where I was like "oh crap" but I was always able to resolve them after thinking carefully about the situation. So now I'm worried this won't be a very challenging playthrough, and considering its length, that's worrisome.

In Long War 1, I always had a good handle on the tactical combat but things just didn't seem to work out at all when it came to interceptors and optimizing my resources and base building etc. But Long War 2 seems to have downplayed that side (though I'm sure I haven't seen all of it yet). The ADVENT strength is still 1 in all my regions, even though I do almost all missions I find.

So I'd like to ask: Is this going to get significantly harder over the course of the campaign? Do the battles get much tougher? Or are there some long term gotchas awaiting on the strategic side, like in Long War 1 where you'd gradually find yourself unable to down any UFOs if you failed to keep up with alien research, meaning you couldn't get enough UFO missions, leading to an uncurable shortage of alloys and elerium? (What is the equivalent of alien research in Long War 2 anyway?) It seems in Long War 2 (thankfully) you should be able to compensate for your mistakes a lot by tweaking the haven allocations and by picking the right missions.

Thanks in advance for any tips!
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johnnylump
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Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 4:12 am

Re: Will the Rookie difficulty get harder?

Post by johnnylump »

We really didn't have a rookie version of the first Long War, unless you did the manual ini-swapping for the "training" configs. For Long War 2 we did try to make the lowest difficulty at least somewhat forgiving.
TommiH
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Nov 18, 2018 9:58 am

Re: Will the Rookie difficulty get harder?

Post by TommiH »

Thanks for your response, johnnylump!

But is there some kind of a steep difficulty curve coming up? Is the ease of the first couple of months a good indicator of how easy it's going to be in the future? Should I start over with the next difficulty if I want to be challenged? Based on your response, I'm guessing the answer is "no, it's not going to get considerably harder", but I'd like to be sure.

Also, if LW2 Rookie is easier than LW1 Rookie, does the same apply to LW1 Veteran and LW2 Veteran?

And is my assessment correct that the strategic side is somewhat less impactful in LW2 than LW1, because there's no air game you need to keep up or you miss on important missions?

Edit: Oh, never mind, looks like difficulty can be changed on the fly. I'll just try out Veteran.
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