So, about that Long War Air combat....

[Vairar]

I just got done with a somewhat frustrating mission. Killed 23 aliens on a supply ship, and I thought I'd get lucky and get another alien craft on the ground. Turns out, not so much. 5 Overseers appeared in the control room, one of which was a leader with 20 health, and they could all regenerate faster than I could hurt them.

 

But that's not the draw of the problem. The draw of the problem is that I am forever lacking in resources and the ability to get more of them. The source of that problem is that my interceptors may as well be made of plastic. Alien ships swat them out of the sky with ease, and even, by some miracle, if I do manage to down an enemy craft and take a pittance of resources (got 50 much needed alloys from an intact UFO earlier), the interceptors are still being repaired and following UFOs can do as they please in the intervening time. I'm about to lose America, which will take the Air and Space bonus with it, and more than likely doom the delicate balance I've managed to scrape by with. Can't afford interceptors, much less upgrades for them, Aliens fly around gathering resources and research, become more numerous, more deadly, Long War lost. I have no idea why they even implemented a veterancy system to LW. It's not like any one pilot is going to accumulate that many kills at this rate anyway. And this is on the lowest difficulty setting!!! I can hardly imagine what it's like on the hardest. Sectoids probably crawl out of your monitor and murder you in your bedroom or something.

 

There is such a thing as a great challenge, and then there's just being silly about it. 50 odd some aliens in a single craft is a challenge. Demanding the player do something like tackle them all with arc throwers and nothing more is being silly about it. Now, I played UFO Defense and even TFTD, and, don't get me wrong, if you do something like send an interceptor with basic weapons up against something like an alien battleship, you deserve whats going to happen to you (hint: it rhymes with "insta-gibbed"). But it is all my airforce can do to bring down a single scout craft. That being said, it's time to cheat.

 

How can I mod interceptors so they're not just paperweights anymore? Am interested in a decrease of challenge with an increase in fun. Long War has all this neat and interesting stuff, but I can't use any of it because of the resource shortage. I need to change enough in my favor to be able to shoot down UFOS DECENTLY. With experience and foundry upgrades, they should be able to do it better and better, and get really good at it after enough investment.

 

So, how about it, internet? Can you help me out?

[Krazyguy75]

That's the point of Long war. You should run away a lot of the time when fighting with your aircraft. I'm under the impression the damage will continue into the next fight. In the long run I had a pilot with around 30 kills because I fed him the final blow on weak ships. I mean, we can mod this, but I'd much rather advise you not to play Long War, or at least not try to play it like the original game. I lost 4 Long War games before I won one. Then I lost two more. Since then I win most of the time. However, Long War does have a good balance to Aircraft research, in that over time your aircraft will be able to take down enemy craft much easier, especially given that taking down and tackling a type of ship gives research that boosts your damage against that type of craft in the future.

 

It sounds like you are still trying to do the original game's tactic of "INTERCEPT EVERYTHING!" when in Long War, it is much better to tackle a small scout or two, get some upgrades from it, avoid combat with bigger ships, get some upgrades, then engage larger ships. Panic is much reduced in terms of how ignoring a ship will impact you. The only ones you have to worry about are the anti-satellite ones. Long War expects you to skip a few interception opportunities, lose a few missions, ignore some UFO landings, etc, etc so you can build up your forces while the aliens build up theirs. Trying to do everything early on will dry up XCOM's resources and spread them too thin. Long War is much more about strategy than brute force.

 

tl;dr: Start small and don't expect to win every fight.

 

We can mod interceptor stats, it just would make the late game really unbalanced.

[Vairar]

*snip*

 

Eh... as much as I adore some of the design decisions that are present in LW, such as the new weapon trees, new classes, new items, and increased alien numbers and health....there are just some design decisions that they made that are extremely stressful and just not fun. You lost 4 long war games before you won one? How long, exactly, did you spend on each game before you admitted defeat? Wasting a ton of time on something that had been doomed days ago isn't fun, it's infuritating.

 

I mean, I can get that you're not supposed to win every battle, but there's sometimes it just feels like a slap in the face. Like what happened to me the other night. I spend well over an hour or so wailing on this one mission. I lost Zhang and a prized high-aim gunner, tore apart hordes of Floaters, put down Mutons, and gave a pack of Chrysallids a running start back to the spawn tubes with my rocketeer. I get to the control room, thinking "OH GOD....finally, this mission is over" BAM, no less than 5 Overseers with a leader. I ordered my sniper to hit one of them while the other 3 troopers pulled back out of harm's way. Overseers regenerated the damage in a single turn, and killed 2 of my squad. Was forced to extract my sniper and my scout and I was not happy. This was the LAST alien pod and it was obnoxious!!!!

[Zyxpsilon]

All i can offer is this;

 

SecondWave options; NSLW, CinematicMode.

And... a gauntlet of tricky edits to INI files such as DefaultGameCore. Some of which are extensively debated in the Long-War Modding discussions.

 

Pick yourself up and try exploring the already instructive set of comments made by others in such threads. Realize that this gameplay is a puzzle to solve or a challenge to find a reasonable Winning method.

Nobody claims, LW is too hard or easy.

It simply takes time and some level of willingness to adapt through indirect cheats or by developping a bunch of personal tricks.

 

It's a looooonnnnggg ladder to climb. Otherwise, where's the fun, pure and unscated, frustrating or enlightening - really?! ;)

[Krazyguy75]

The primary challenge is in unlearning the original game. Camping is a legitimate strategy. All in all, I'd say you should feel free to save scum the first long war game you play, just so you can learn the ropes. I assume by "overseers" you mean Outsiders, and you were amazingly behind the curve in terms on weapon tech if you couldn't beat their regen (what is it, 3 hp per turn?). All in all, I must inform you that my general policy on landing missions is "If I don't have a good team, I don't take the mission. If I lose more than one person before the final fight, I abandon the mission."

 

If you didn't have the tech to take down 5 outsiders, you really shouldn't have assaulted a landed Supply ship, as they are the second hardest to take down after battleships, and landings have ~2x the number of aliens as normal. Long War is all about hard choices, and letting the aliens go is one of the hardest things to learn.

[slothen2]

Eh... as much as I adore some of the design decisions that are present in LW, such as the new weapon trees, new classes, new items, and increased alien numbers and health....there are just some design decisions that they made that are extremely stressful and just not fun. You lost 4 long war games before you won one? How long, exactly, did you spend on each game before you admitted defeat? Wasting a ton of time on something that had been doomed days ago isn't fun, it's infuritating.

 

Losing is often fun. Losing in the air war, not so much. I'm on my first long war game, I'm playing it on normal which is apparently the easiest setting without cinematic mode. I'm taking the strategy I saw someone using in an impossible game, which was to get 6 inteceptors and mostly full sat coverage on one continent before expanding. I'm like a month and a half in and I now have 6 ceptors, and have been splashing scouts left and right, to the point that im now making sure to let NOE scouts land for more salvage as most of my ceptors have a kill secured. I haven't even built aircraft boosters yet, and I'm expecting for it to get a lot harder. Just gotta remember that its more important to account for how healthy your ceptors are when you decide to engage, and that not killing UFOs in the air is not only less bad than in vanilla, its often optimal.