Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Graknorke]

So let's say you were hypothetically advising a player who had never played through newcom all the way through.
Would you recommend LW over vanilla EW to play through or not?

[Urist Imiknorris]

Long War assumes you know a lot about how the game works. I've never broken out the training DGC, but it might help some.

[Mephansteras]

So let's say you were hypothetically advising a player who had never played through newcom all the way through.
Would you recommend LW over vanilla EW to play through or not?

No, not really. Long War is great, but I think you should experience vanilla all the way through first. Not the least because Long War isn't just a name, the game really is much longer.

[puke]

Before I got to the halfway point of LW, I would have been strongly in favor of playing it to the exclusion of vanilla.

As an Oldcom fan, I played vanilla for about 30 minutes before I started getting irritated, and about 3 hours before I was totally fed up.  LW made it not only playable for me, but really fun.

The problem is in the mid to late game, and I hear vanilla has a similar problem, LW just compounds it.  I think if you tweaked it to be an 8x or 16x speed Dynamic War campaign, it would probably be perfect.

But you can definitely play LW without playing vanilla.  If your friend is an oldcom fan, I wouldn't even recommend touching vanilla.  But if he likes faster paced games with simpler mechanics?  Maybe LW isn't for him.

Actually, I'm going to say that if this person needs to be "introduced" to the game at all and isnt immediately familiar with turn based tactics and other games of a similar nature, and they don't just jump on it willingly as soon as they hear that it exists and does not suck?  If you need to "convince" anyone of the games quality?  Long War is probably not for that person.

[BurnedToast]

So let's say you were hypothetically advising a player who had never played through newcom all the way through.
Would you recommend LW over vanilla EW to play through or not?

Vanilla

Long war is a lot more random (no reliable grenades or mostly-reliable rockets) and that's especially punishing for new players who might not be good at risk management. LW is also a lot more complicated, and not always in a good way - sometimes less really is more. Also like puke said, the endgame drags on a lot in LW - vanilla has some pacing issues too but at least dragging on forever is not one of them.

I think I'm probably the only person who thinks LW is overrated and prefers vanilla, though.

[Flying Dice]

Puke got it right. If they need to be "introduced" to a TBT game they're too casual to start with LW and enjoy it.

[Rolan7]

That's true, yeah.
It's also true that Long War is absurdly more difficult than the base game, and that some people who understood and enjoyed vanilla are going to find it overwhelming.
It talks about "learning to retreat", but introduces *even worse* snowball mechanics.  They made it easier to hold on after some failures, but harder to actually recover since the battlescape gets exponentially harder.  Exponentially because of the worst mechanic introduced: Damage Reduction.  The difference between DR and health is that group attacks don't work against DR.  Low on specialists, because you're *losing*?  Rookies have no options against high-DR enemies!
Also regeneration lol

It's waaaay more difficult than oldCOM, at least to me.  Too bad oldCOM has a bad interface and gets super repetitive.  I'd rather give Openxcom another go, maybe with some mods, then finish LW.

My last LW campaign was going well, btw.  I got really lucky capturing the first supply ship.  I savescummed a bit to capture the second.  Mostly because I was so starved for resources, but also because even a single extra point of enemy DR would have wrecked me.  I was getting bored, and a resource setback would have just limited my options further.  LW introduces a ton of cool toys but really makes you save up to use most of them.  Hence the name, I guess.

Pods are so large and wander so fast, that I was often in the insane situation of needing every hit to be a one-hit-kill.  Against these supposedly advanced alien invaders.  Can't finish enemies off with pistols, because DR means they often take 0 damage!  Can't advance for a flank, because the fog - or even the visible area - is teeming with more enemies.  Destroying cover with explosives helps, but costs an entire action - and the direct damage is sad, even on a direct hit.

Site Recon went pretty well too...  Well, after savescumming the first turn.  Much like the supply ships, the trick turned out to be not advancing at all.  Riveting tactical gameplay.  Once the initial hellswarm was removed by stages, it was pretty normal.

Then the game crashed to desktop reliably when loading my first covert op retrieval.  I hadn't had crashes up to this point so I googled about Exalt bugs, and found out what I could expect from their missions.  Screw.  That.  Alien conquerors being overpowered and inevitably winning is one thing, this just looked dumb.

I'll agree that I'm "too casual" for Long War, but in my opinion, that's not saying much.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly, there are a lot of Second Wave options you can use to shift the balance around. I imagine LW on Impossible with no beneficial SW options would be hell, though.

[Mephansteras]

What I'd really like is an extended early game and a compressed late game. I really enjoy fighting Sectoids with ballistics, with the occasional drone/thin man/floater to spice things up. While everything else in the game can be a blast, I find that the early game is the most fun for whatever reason.

[BigFatStupidHead]

My save bugged out and I had to restart. But that's okay, because I switched to the awesome France with Quai d'Orsay. With dynamic war at 50% and Quick and Dirty enabled, it is starting to feel like a game I could play through more than once.