Marathon and Long War?

[Noble Ten]

Hi

I've recently started an X-com Enemy within game with the Marathon 2nd wave checked (since I completed EU awhile ago. And its been a few months and I am doing pretty well, I only just took my first causlity last night after like 20+ missions (my affrican who grew up running from lions, may you rest in peace From that mutan 9 damage crit in full cover). Well the purpose of the Marathon is because I wanted to feel like I was actually in a long war with the aliens. Not somethign done in a few months like the orignal game.

So playing a marathon game, I am doing pretty well (well playing normal since I hate the unrest ♥♥♥♥) which at this stage of the game, I have satellites in every country except England and Germany, and I lost India (my base is in Asia). This is some info about my current game. I dont like to reload if I loose a guy, if a guy dies in combat, its fair game. The only mission I found myself reloading at checkponts was this mission (which the mission was graet btw) was when Chysiilds were popping out of sharks, I was only reloading to figure out how to do this mission tacticly, Because getting to that button was a suiside run for my soldiers ( I didnt know I could wait it out). I thought they would keep spawning. Anway that info is beside the point.

I've been talking to a friend about this Long war mod. Which basicly changes the game to feel more realistc and tells me its way harder. So some quick investigation, I seen that troops have fatigue times, which is great, because I am always rotating my squads. Basicly I rotatting my top guys, thus I generally slip recruits and low levels into the taem to get experience why a main guys lead, then I retoate and rotate. So that works well.

Anway to keep the rest short, I also noticed Long war doesnt ahve the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ theres 3 abductions but can only send 1 chopper (when I have 24 soldiers on standby with 2 SHIVs) which seems good,

The bad thing I've head about Long war is its really brutal. I dont want to play a brutal game where I just get smashed.. I am up for fair challenge, I dont mind if I take causalties, its part of war. Dont watn to verse aliens that have insane health. I'd rather fight vs larger quantities of aliens (say like coming up vs a swarm of 3-4 health Setoids and there plasma pistols) or more aliens per mission in general. Also do my soilders really become colour coded? I really dont like the idea of my soldiers standing out like fluro. I still like to customize them to colour and give them most of the heavies and Assaults helmits. Make them look like a military organizations special forces.

Anway the purpose to this post is just asking about the difference between marathon and trying Long war?. What are the pros and cons to long war? Can I still play marathon with Long war installed ?

[K. the Land-Surveyor]

Marathon is still vanilla XCOM, just things take much longer.

Long War adds a bunch of stuff. Here's[www.ufopaedia.org] the wiki to look over all the stuff Long War. Alien health really scales up as the game goes on, as well as facing larger quantitiies of them.

[Mhblis]

Yeah play a couple of months of LW get an idea of the mechanics and then hop into the ini and you can tailor the game more to your difficulty level.

You won't even need to play it in marathon but my advise.
- Tweak Arc thrower success up by 10%
- Increase number of starting rookies.
- Tweak the resource increase research cost down by 1/4
- Tweak the amount of XP needed per Psi level.

With those edits which are all very well commented the game will be less grindy but still long and challenging. The Psi XP and success chance is just painful since it only makes you do the same thing over and over rather than progress. Pretty much you hit small shot down scouts over and over because Psi XP is only gained on successful missions at a fixed rate. And the arc thrower is only useful since you need to get alien weapons to make Xcom plasmas.

[red255]

you can tweak the ini file to make long war less brutal. they'll still be problems but there are plenty of things you can fix.

[AlexMBrennan]

What are the pros and cons to long war?

The cons are: It's a mod which is currently in beta. Based on previous releases, you absolutely should expect game breaking bugs which make the game impossible to complete (such as it always crashing when you encounter the commander in the alien base).

Further, there are significant limits to what Long War, being a mod, can do - for example, you are stuck with maps balanced for six XCOM soldiers, so simply increasing the number of troops will have subobtimal results (e.g. do you think chess would have greater tactical depth if both sides had 24 pawns?)

Pro: Long War as a bunch of interesting concepts.

If you think a bunch of interesting concepts that are poorly implemented and barely work, then go for Long War. Don't come crying if the tutorial keeps crashing or if you have to go read every item in a list because the developers have't thought of ordering items by group (e.g. scatter laser near other laser weapon) or even alphabetically...

[happy]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

What are the pros and cons to long war?

The cons are: It's a mod which is currently in beta. Based on previous releases, you absolutely should expect game breaking bugs which make the game impossible to complete (such as it always crashing when you encounter the commander in the alien base).

Further, there are significant limits to what Long War, being a mod, can do - for example, you are stuck with maps balanced for six XCOM soldiers, so simply increasing the number of troops will have subobtimal results (e.g. do you think chess would have greater tactical depth if both sides had 24 pawns?)

Pro: Long War as a bunch of interesting concepts.

If you think a bunch of interesting concepts that are poorly implemented and barely work, then go for Long War. Don't come crying if the tutorial keeps crashing or if you have to go read every item in a list because the developers have't thought of ordering items by group (e.g. scatter laser near other laser weapon) or even alphabetically...

that is a brutal review of longwar, too brutal to be honest

i ve played a thousand of hours of longwar, from normal to ironman impossible

longwar works just fine, i must have had 5 crashes in 1000hours(playing with steam offline helps a lot), and no game breaking bug ever

on normal, it s easier than vanilla xcom(two carriable items per soldier), up to august

you get a real feeling of being in a war, you can fail, abort missions without putting your whole playthrough in dire situation

you can, indeed, tweak the game core ini to your liking, you don t need to, but its doable

late game, starting from november, missions get tedious and too long and unbalanced, you basically use ghost grenades or bust, it not fun, so most people quit there...and restart right away, because the first 6 months of longwar are just brilliant

you get an average 10 missions per month, so even if you quit in november, thats a lot of hours of fun

[Hans]

Longwar was an interesting concept, but I personally prefer vanilla XCOM with as many Second Wave options enabled as possible.

My biggest complaint about Longwar was that it was incredibly tedious and didn't add substantial tactical depth. Many fights turn into grueling slugfests where you trade fire and no one can manage to land a hit. This clip is what it feels like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr2GeWiDrdY

[Mhblis]

I agree that the smaller ships are just awful to play later into the game. I do like the battleship style missions a lot more. They are truly challenging. A poor strategy really hurts. The fact that you can retreat also means you can actually plan and make hit an runs rather than make every mission a do or die situation.

The tweaks I offered earlier makes the November hump appear later down the track and smooths out some of the other grind areas without seriously impacting on the difficulty.

I have to second that I've hit only two game breaking bugs in my time and one of them is a holdover from vanilla that is just exasherbated by the extra units of LW. Ironically Beta 14 lists it as fixed.

[Noble Ten]

Ok, so sorta starting a long war game. I've gave a quick look over the ini, and made some cosmtic changes. Got rid of that stupid red, and setting my Soilders to grayis black inuforms this time round (32) to look pretty professional, not fluro saying "here I am". I actually should make it that my DD classes get combat helmets by default (that be pretty sweet). that is a nice little function I found so far.

Anyway a few questions about ini editing and stuff in general.

Research
I've raed here and there and noticed that the aliens get research. My question is ... why? The aliens have already done and complete there research before assaulting earth. Thats why they roll the with the lastest gene moding and weapons (Plasma) + armor and fly in UFOs in the game alraedy. Stuff like sectoids and mutan powersuits is because of there advanced research is already completed. So why is Long war do they need to research further ? Its us, the humans who are alraedy playing catch up. I dont really get this part of Long war. Is there any real solid reason the creators think that the aliens lack research ? To me, theres already a long stretch between us.

I've also noticed after the first mission, that fatigue is way to long... I am all for Fatigue, but 5 days ? feels to long. 3 days feels about right. Is 5 days there to enforce squad rotation ?

[Procrastinating Gamer]

Originally posted by Noble Tenshi:

I've also noticed after the first mission, that fatigue is way to long... I am all for Fatigue, but 5 days ? feels to long. 3 days feels about right. Is 5 days there to enforce squad rotation ?

Partly. Remember that you can still take a Fatigued soldier on a mission, it just means that they'll be wounded for up to ten days afterwards (basically representing some management official or another saying "Right; you've been pushing that soldier too much lately, give them a week off."). Averages are about a week - a good thing to do when you get two missions right after another is to take a couple of your Fatigued soldiers who are close to levelling up. They'll only be out for an extra couple of days, on average, and they get two missions worth of XP in a short span of time, possibly enough to get them up a level.

[PJ]

Long War isn't actually that brutal if you take normal difficulty. You'll lose soldiers, but it's not unfair at all. Also, country panic is extremely forgiving.

[Noble Ten]

Well I guess I can only take your words for it.

Another thing to mention. I generally happy with 6 man squads (Being Spec-op alike). But been told you can get up to 12. So I guess a good question to ask is.... is sticking with 6 probably not a good idea in long war? Well I can improvise if I have too, I do like using SHIVS, so I can probably fill those spaces up with Mecs and SHIVS if thats the path I have to take. But I thought I'd ask just to get an idea.

[red255]

Originally posted by Noble Tenshi:

Anway the purpose to this post is just asking about the difference between marathon and trying Long war?. What are the pros and cons to long war? Can I still play marathon with Long war installed ?

....Long war felt more balanced than marathon mode was. No. Marathon second wave was removed in favor of 'not so long war' which is basically marathon mode is the default and not so long war is more like Vanilla.

The Pros of long war is it adds alot of nice stuff. the Cons of long war is it has some balancing issues.

but the long war mod ini is well commented so if something bothers you for balance you can easily just change it.

Originally posted by Noble Tenshi:

Research
Blah Blah Blah QQ


I've also noticed after the first mission, that fatigue is way to long... I am all for Fatigue, but 5 days ? feels to long. 3 days feels about right. Is 5 days there to enforce squad rotation ?

Is it more realistic to not use your mutons early? and to learn things fighting humans?
Its more the difference between rookie thin men and Colonel thin men sir.

one you get one day less fatigue if you use an officer with stay frosty. and 2 you can set Fatigue in the ini. its meant to be too long to force the issue sure but game is much less tedious at 75% fatigue.

[psychotron666]

You guys do realize you can customize your character's colours, right? They are colour coded as default, the recruits are red (like ensign redshirts from star trek), and then when they get assigned a class, they change to the colour of that class. But after that, you can change their colours and look to whatever you want and it wont get changed back on you.

The mod is great though. It actually seemed easier than vanilla for the first 2 months at least. And even then, running into missions with 60 dudes isnt even that staggeringto be honest. At the end of a mission when i see i killed 60 dudes and nobody died, i feel a bit of pride that i actually accomplished something.

The only time i encountered a seemingly impossible situation was when i hit (i think) a bug. It was that mission on the dam where you gotta run across the damn releasing those valves and reach the end. By the last few turns i was getting duplicate aliens dropping, as in a muton would drop, and then another muton would drop in the EXACT same spot as the one that just dropped, so there'd be 2 mutons in the same square.

I was one turn from making it to the end and in a single turn, 2 mectoids, 4 sectoids, and 2 mutons all dropped on THE SAME SQUARE right in the middle of my group, making it so there was no possible way for my guys to survive the next turn.

Luckily i managed to get my scout to run, set off 8 (!!!) overwatches at once and get wiped out (so i reloaded and did it again and this time she didnt die), and there was literally nothing i could do to kill them all, so i just tried to take my mec and run for the exit and wa la, i finished the mission (I was lucky as all hell that the mission actually ended when i walked into the square, as all my team wasnt gonna be able to make it to the exit in a single turn).

Though it felt like a glitch in that every time a guy dropped, another guy exactly like him dropped in the same square. I dont know if it was a longwar glitch or a normal glitch, but so far in 120 hours of playing longwar it's the only glitch ive seen so far.

[red255]

long war randomizes drops, apparently the progeny map is strange. Clearly some issue with the randomized drops report it. still I would have rocketed.

[psychotron666]

I was outta rockets by then, and i literally save scummed and tried like 5 other scenarios where i tried to kill them all on that single turn with what grenades i had and everything and just wasnt able to do it without them taking out 3 or more of my guys in a turn (some of my dudes were already beat up by then). The whole mission was a breeze until that very last turn for me.

I didnt feel too bad leaving behind a few aliens to get away on that turn, as i felt like i was cheaped out with a glitch. Otherwise i never leave a mission until i kill everyone if possible.