XCOM 2 is out, OK, THIS TIME FOR REAL

[Scipio]

BTW, advanced stock equipped on grenadiers is just gold. A license to auto-shred armor.

[DGuller]

Is it just me, or has this game totally failed the test of time?  It seemed great when it came out, but there is virtually no replay value to it.  You either wipe out or disable majority of enemies you encounter the turn you encounter them, or you're kind of fucked.  That gets one-dimensional after a while.

[FunkMonk]

Not really seeing that. I just booted it up a couple days ago after a long time of not playing and I had a blast just playing the gate crasher mission.

I have some mods enabled too. Maybe get some mods?

[DGuller]

Are there any Long War type mods out there, except without the stupid piled on and on to make it tediously impossible to win?

[Scipio]

New mod, new busted junk. Fucking terrible buggy updates. Every time it updates, I have to validate my local files. Unfuckingbelievable.

And I have checked my hard drive thoroughly.

[Scipio]

And the two new expansion packs have totally busted open the game. Uggh. Super unbalanced.

[Syt]

Long War 2 is out. PC Gamer and RPS are gushing over it:
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-long-war-2-mod-is-a-must-play-reinvention-of-xcom-2/
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/01/19/xcom-2-the-long-war-2-mod-review/

[DGuller]

I hope they're smarter about game balance this time.  They really lost the plot with the later betas of the original Long War, making the game essentially unplayable without a whole lot of save-scumming.

[Syt]

Haven't played LW1, but I seem to recall that it was built to have hard or impossible fights so that the player would have to make calls whether fights were winnable and retreat if they weren't. From what I've read and seen, this holds true for LW2.

[Duque de Bragança]

I have not played XCOM 2 the amount of time I played XCOM so Long War 2, while intriguing will have to wait.
As for Long War 1 in Classic that was too much for me.

[DGuller]

Haven't played LW1, but I seem to recall that it was built to have hard or impossible fights so that the player would have to make calls whether fights were winnable and retreat if they weren't. From what I've read and seen, this holds true for LW2.

That was the theory.  You weren't going to win every fight, but that's fine, you can retreat or even lose a fight or two and recover to win.  In practice, in the later betas, doing anything other than winning every single fight would just snowball on you.

[Syt]

Had a look at the Long War 1 mod page. They recommend playing on Normal difficulty. Did you play on classic?

[DGuller]

Had a look at the Long War 1 mod page. They recommend playing on Normal difficulty. Did you play on classic?

I played on the lowest difficulty I could.  It wasn't impossible, 95% of the time, but the bullshit was unavoidable the other 5% that would permanently cripple your campaign.  Therefore, I just couldn't play on Ironman, which already removes 75% of the enjoyment you get from the game.

[Scipio]

Long War 1 sucked, after a while.

This one looks a lot better.

[Tonitrus]

Had a look at the Long War 1 mod page. They recommend playing on Normal difficulty. Did you play on classic?

The last version of LW1, with many of the starting options pegged in your favor...especially the one that reduces the number of aliens on the tactical missions (which seems to take things from "ridiculous" to almost being "too easy"...it could probably benefit from a middle ground option)...and still using Ironman, is not too bad.