The very 1st mission can be the hardest learning curve. If any of your squad can see another pod (group) of aliens, then do not ambush the primary target unless you are sure you will take them out in the first set of volleys. One pod at a time. Take your time to move around until you find the best place to ambush from. Forget every tactic you think you learnt from the vanilla game and make use of your stealth units as spotters to the max

Originally posted by Element UK:

The very 1st mission can be the hardest learning curve. If any of your squad can see another pod (group) of aliens, then do not ambush the primary target unless you are sure you will take them out in the first set of volleys. One pod at a time. Take your time to move around until you find the best place to ambush from. Forget every tactic you think you learnt from the vanilla game and make use of your stealth units as spotters to the max

thanks for the tips will do this xD

Also - read about infiltration - even if mission says 'Light' - its Light (13 - 15 enemies) if you will infiltrate to 100%. Read compendium: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4_jI6KjmwMJMGxyR2FRcEdya3M/view and Long war 2 wiki for more details.

Honestly, Pavonis Interactive blew my mind once again with the new Long War. It has new models, new mechanics and so on... But unfortunatly, they did the same mistake that killed Long War 1: The difficulty.

Saying that Long War 2 is hard mid-campaign is an understatement, it's almost impossible to win if you trigger 2/3 groups at the same time, wich cannot be avoided with 20+ enemies each missions. And since those enemies are not your regular ADVENT troopers (most likely aliens), you have a chance to get really nasty encounters pretty early in a campaign. A little spoiler ahead: in the ADVENT regional HQ, you get what's call an ADVENT General. 20-50HP, 90-100 aim, 2-5 armor. This doesn't seem much, but when your guys have 7 HP, the difference is real.

The infiltration mechanic is a good idea, but poorly used. I had a go with a mission early in the campaign where I couldn't finish the infiltration and got a mission far harder than it should have been at this stage of the game. Other mechanics are present in Long War 2, but you either don't know about them or don't care about them, because you know, what could go wrong ? Oh yeah, a defeat in less than 2 weeks on the geoscape.

Another problem is the Avatar Project: You simply don't get enough mission to prevent it from getting 100%, and even if you get one, you'll get a 40+ enemies mission with horrible aliens in it. Even if you finish this mission, maybe the Avatar project will get a 2+ from research or dark event. This is simply too much to handle when you're struggling with just keeping your A-team alive.

Talking about dark events, let's talk about them: as i'm sure you know, Long War 2 introduced a new type of dark event called Tactical Dark Events, wich are pretty much PERMANENT buff to ADVENT like +5 aim or +1 hp. Doesn't seem to bad, until you realized that your average trooper has now +15 aim, +2 armor and +20 will, making it far more dangerous, as well as numerous, that it should be.

Now, another thing people won't agree about, but I need to mention it as well. In Long War 2, you do stealth missions. That is wrong. Xcom is not about hidding and avoiding fights. Not only because it's not meant for that (can't see the enemy line of sight before entering it, having to do a mission in 50 turns not to get spotted) but because it's not the Xcom way. Xcom doesn't hide, Xcom fights the Alien. Now wait a minute white that answer, I know that there's the Ambush system. An ambush, if i'm correct, is a trap, where you KILL people that get ambushed.

I know some people are going to say: "duuh, ur just bad" or "oooh, it's meant to be hard". I get it, it isn't for newbies, but seeing Xcom veteran such as Marbozir fail at Long War, not by playing badly or making mistakes, but simply getting a game over by the Avatar Project. It's such a shame that all that effort was wasted by making the mod unfair to the player. Like I said before, Long War 1 was fair at first, but near the end of Xcom, and hype of Xcom 2, it became impossible with late game aliens appearing far too early to be able to kill them.

On the good side, they game is more gorgeous than ever. Shiny new weapons, enemies, maps... all of that work is great, and I can only support their work. They are great coming with either good ideas or new ones. I don't think they made Long War 2 this hard on purpose and it's just coming from a lack of feedback saying that Long War is just too hard for players.

Thank you for taking the time to read my critic about Long War 2, and I hope Pavonis Interactive will find a way to make the mod winable.

The biggest thing is that there is no tutorial for LW2 mechanics. People experienced with XCOM2 can't just hop into long war and assume they do well. People have to actively seek information from the ufopaedia wiki or at least in the glossary inside the game. Understanding infiltration is the first important thing. The next thing is how to assign the resistance personnel in the regions. Not enough intel tasks means you never find missions quick enough to infiltrate them properly, but recruiting is important as well. Gathering supplies at first is not that crucial, because you will get them from black market and certain missions.

For example, unlike in XCOM2, you are not supposed, and are certainly not _required_ to take all the missions. During the first weeks when the crew is inexperienced, don't take any missions you can't infiltrate close to 100%, at least not any timed ones because it is hard to battle through all those pods. Extremely light and very light activities are fine, light activity and more is tough with a squaddie-lance corpral-corpral crews.

The dark events that give the enemies bonuses are fine, but the game does not exactly tell you how to counter them: You need to expand. Dark events happen when certain enemy activity happens in a region, and you can counter it only if you have contacted that region and gather intel in there to find the mission.

Previous poster mentioned about keeping his A-team alive. Well, in LW2, there has to be a lot more than one "A" team. As the game progresses, you should have dozens of soldiers, and this means even a squad wipe of 6 soldiers doesn't make you lose the game. In my current playthrough I have 7 squads with 6-8 people in each, and I constantly recruit more. It is not even possible to infiltrate all the good missions that give you decent rewards, if you don't have several squads at your disposal.

TLDR: I suggest you play with either of the two easiest settings, and learn about the LW2 concepts. Expand quickly and keep recruiting and training new people pretty much all the time. It's not too hard when you get to know the mod.

Thanks for the tips, but i'm done with Long War 2. I might give it a shot when it will be beatable still.

hard as i never managed to finsh a LW campaign, even on Xcom EW, best mod ever.

Long war is hardcore, prepare for butthurt.

the start is way too hard for rookies if they should give us some high level people to make if fair

Started my second mission completely surrounded by 20+ enemy troops. Killed 37 of them by the end of the mission. Lost all but 2 squad members - one was carried out. Third mission faced 200+ enemy on my first encounter. Fourth mission all of the last of my XCom operatives are completely wiped out. No resources left to hire more rookies.

The mod is stupid.

It is just throwing endless rookies at insane numbers of enemy every mission. You get 2-3 missions a DAY. Before my first research project is even complete it is game over. That is on Rookie mode!

Long war isn't hard core. It is a waste of time.

Sounds like you're missing out on the infiltration then. I play at veteran level and have a fraction of the opposition in the first few missions sofar. Infiltrate

It doesn't seem to do anything at all.

Infiltration reduces the number of enemies in a mission I think. The more you infiltrate, the less the enemies

This isn't a matter of "git gud scrub". If it were then 80% of the feedback you see regarding Long War wouldn't be "What moron decided that that was ok balancing?". Even Dark Souls isn't this bad, and while people can be just as elitist on their forums as they are here they usually have at least one or two people who provide some important piece of knowledge rather than the Long War forums which has zero people doing that because the bottom line is that you CAN'T do anything differently because they didn't balance it properly.

They did a lot of cool things in the two mods, but like the other guy said they are killed by the fact that their difficulty isn't difficult, it's impossible. The only positive feedback I have ever heard about the difficulty has come from people who enjoy the fact that they keep getting squad wiped, and if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know then I don't know how to help you.

Originally posted by Unrak the Shieldbearer:

Infiltration reduces the number of enemies in a mission I think. The more you infiltrate, the less the enemies

If that is the case then I'd hate to see what it would do if I hadn't been using it!!

Originally posted by Reverend Belial:

This isn't a matter of "git gud scrub". If it were then 80% of the feedback you see regarding Long War wouldn't be "What moron decided that that was ok balancing?". Even Dark Souls isn't this bad, and while people can be just as elitist on their forums as they are here they usually have at least one or two people who provide some important piece of knowledge rather than the Long War forums which has zero people doing that because the bottom line is that you CAN'T do anything differently because they didn't balance it properly.

They did a lot of cool things in the two mods, but like the other guy said they are killed by the fact that their difficulty isn't difficult, it's impossible. The only positive feedback I have ever heard about the difficulty has come from people who enjoy the fact that they keep getting squad wiped, and if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know then I don't know how to help you.

Ditto. I love 90% of this mod. A lot of great things done and a lot of quality work has gone into the mod. However the dificulty level is so grossly overdone as to make this mod unplayable to most people. You would need to be a sadist or play nothing other than XCom2 every day to get through the game with this mod on.

The vanilla game is overly easy, but LongWar2 went totally the other way. Some better balance would be very nice.

The difficulty problem as been around for about... I'd say near the end of Xcom: Enemy Unknown, before the Xcom 2 hype. Remember Long War from Xcom: Enemy Unknown ? Yeah, it went from "hard" to "6 heavy floater pod vs 6 corporals". Litteraly impossible, since you could inflict 1/2 damage on a 25+ HP enemy IF you hit. Not saying that they did 12/15 damage per shot.

In Long War 2, there's no unkillable enemies but instead, you have 1 pod replacing a single alien.

Some ideas to reduce difficulty:

- Reduce pod size or general enemies per mission
- Slow the alien research speed (The time the aliens spend on upgrading their units)
- Reduce missions number / frequency
- Do a tutorial to explain all mechanics
- Don't do permanent, un-counterable dark events
- Nerf OP units (ADVENT General...) because they have 100 aim, wich means AT LEAST 60% chance to hit your frail soldiers. That's more than 1/2

That should fix most difficulty / gameplay issues