Why I Have 1,430 Hours In™ XCOM: Long War 1

7:40 - The way the aesthetics and mechanics in the Xcom series create that theme of moral compromise w/o overtly drawing attention to it is one of my favorite things about the series too. I love how in the og UFO Defense, strategies like "preemptively killing civilians in Chryssalid missions" or "becoming an indiscriminate arms manufacturer" can emerge solely thru mechanical interactions. When they release Xcom 3 in 2030, hopefully they won't screw that up.

"and Floaters... are idiots" My beautiful, special little boys

It's good to see that EW Long War is still being played. It's my favorite game of all time.

I want to add a couple of things for anyone who might be discouraged by the campaign length/difficulty. This is, of course, directed to people that haven't played the mod and are discourage by its perceived difficulty and time requirement. This mod is a true jewel that nobody should be put off of because of difficulty: 1) the game doesn't have to be incredibly long. There is a Dynamic War Second Wave option that can be tweaked to cut down in mission numbers and research time significantly (I think default is 1/2, but you can set it to 1/8 or whatever you want, or you could even double the length if that's what you're after) 2) the game is certainly harder than vanilla, but it's not RIDICOUSLY HARD unless you want it to be. Nobody is forcing you to play Impossible/Ironman. Play Normal with reloads allowed, use the Training Config if you want it to be even easier. You can also significantly reduce the difficulty if you can't handle the default settings with Second Waves alone: crank those Cinematic War, Durability and Friendly Skies Second Wave options on and go to town. There's absolutely no shame in doing so. 3) the wiki is your best friend. It's really well done and complete, remember to check it out and it'll solve 95% of your doubts. For anything else, our community is small but helpful and welcoming. Post on Reddit or Discord and people will always help. Remember that what you see on Youtube/Twitch is usually content made by people with thousands of hours playing at max difficulty and sometimes even modding the mod to make it even harder. If that's not your cup of tea, just don't do it. It's a game, it has to fun, and if really tough challenge isn't your definition of fun, just lower it, reload if things go wrong and learn at your pace. Hell, I have 1k hours at least and I still use Friendly Skies even when playing I/I and I know I'm not the only one. I don't like having to play Excel Sheets simulator to play the air game, and the air game gates all the fun toys I love to use, so why make life more frustrating when the solution is a simple button I can press at the start of a campaign? BTW, this applies to LWotC as well. I personally found it a lot of fun, I only have put like 100 hours in but I surprised me in a good way. It's certainly a completely removed experience from LW1, but it's not worse in any way, just different. I'm loving it, but LW1 still holds a special place in my heart.

7:59 breaking the ice with enbies is always so easy. Ask them what their ideal robotic body and you have an hour long convo stacked up

I’m so glad you brought up the individual enemy AI. One of the worst changes in xcom 2 is that almost every enemy behaves the same. The one that gets me the most is that they always run suppression where as in Enemy Within only the psycho mechtoids would do that.

I think the best thing i heard about this mod was the Devs themselves said the base game is a "30 hour tutorial for long war."

Not sure if you ended up figuring it out but you can have multiple squads in Jagged Alliance 3 attack the same area, meaning you can have like 12 mercs in one battle if you wish. Just have them both move to the same location and close the window prompting an attack from your first squad if they don't arrive at the same time.

The story of Dr. Vahlen is an interesting one. She was ALWAYS a crazy mad scientist that would look past her own morals just to sate her curiosity. She basically admits it herself in XCOM 2 with one of her voice lines. "Commander, sometimes I wish you were still here to keep my ambitions in check." The only reason she didn't do anything TOO psychotic in EU or EW was because XCOM reined in her more crazy tendencies. On a somewhat related note, I always found it funny how XCOM uses stereotypes. You have the serious American soldier (Bradford), the eccentric mad scientist that happens to be German (Dr. Vahlen), and in the first and second game you have the techy Asians (The Shen family). The stereotype for Dr. Tygan is much harder to find but if you dig deep enough, he's a Black American that lived in Chicago I guess? Kind of weird that he doesn't really fit neatly into any particular stereotype considering pretty much every other character does but I enjoy his character anyways.

Thank you for making an enjoyable, well thought out, and articulate video. I especially enjoy how you, unlike about 90% of Youtube, sprinkle in memes as a nice comedic punch rather than shitting memes all over because if one meme is funny then, you know, a turd pile of them will be hilarious, right? Also, big props for leaving in natural voice over speech rather than editing out any spaces between words making it sound like you are doing it all in one breath like a lot of Youtuber's do. Thanks.

I literally started a LW playthrough again today after giving up on my last one a couple of months ago. I'm really glad you popped up in my feed

It's wild to find a channel that objectively has the best taste in and takes on games. I especially like the point about action economy spiral. Weaker strategy games require near-perfection and great luck otherwise the battle is FUBAR, something even more damning in a long-form campaign. Anyway, now I'm gonna start looking into The Campaign for North Africa.

As a person who's never actually managed to finish a game of XCOM, LW is completely terrifying in scope to me. Maybe I'll give it another crack.

LWotC is the GOAT, my man. The. GOAT. Still being improved, tweaked, gradually reworked by its biggest fans years after its first beta release into the consummate tactical shooter. My bet is that we won't see a better one until the 2030s.

I got this video in my recommended 2 days ago. Last night I had the thought that I'd play Long War. You sold me on it. Today, I just 5 minutes ago beat the landed large ship early in the game. I've never had an XCOM experience like Long War 1. Thank you for making this video, and thank you for introducing not just me but many other people to this fucking masterpiece.

I'm not sure if I've ever heard the MEC death voice lines... Man I need to play More Long War.

I just started playing XCOM and have been enjoying it a lot. I can't exactly say what I find so appealing and interesting about the game, but I know that I have a lot of fun playing it. Great video!

As a big fan of Long War i wholeheartily reccomend playing the campaign with a friend. Me and a few buddys of mine play the game through parsec where everyone "Owns" certain characters, it really helps take off some of the fatique you mentioned in the video and obviously, every game is better with friends. What i particularly enjoy about this "Multiplayer" is the inevtiable clashes and emergent stories this setup creates, such as your friends inevitably making moves you disagreed with or making builds that you yourself would never run. Its quite fun, for everyone that has acsess to insane wierdos in their friend group thatll say yes to a long war campaign, try it out!

The larger troop count is why I prefer the original XCOM: UFO defense to a lot of modern XCOM, certainly to XCOM 2; you can bring up to 14 soilders with the initial troop transport, and up to 26 with the avenger, if you actually want to do that is a different question. You can also bring various HWPs (Tanks and alien tech equivalents) using up quite a few crew slots each, but not needing to grind up from private making them disposable and tanky. Of course Being able to bring more than 2 squads worth of troops does lead to issues, both in having to actually control them, max item count issues (open XCOM fixes those), and of course the fact that you probably dont (in fact you basically cant) have 26 elite soilders and one panicked (or MCed) rookie with an explosive can wipe the entire landing craft before you get to disembark, or even a panic cascade from the mind controlled rookie shooting the XO, which leads to everyone firing wildly before even disembarking, leading to mass fatalities before you even see the first alien. Although to a certain degree that is part of the charm. It also has you managing multiple bases, with the ability to intercept multiple craft at once, and dealing with possibly multiple combat missions at once; that allows you to make specialized bases for say radar / hyperwave decoder coverage, research, engineering, intercepting craft and launching ground missions, although you really dont want any that just do one or 2, and if your launching interceptors you want a troop contingent on base to fight off possible retaliations, at which point you might as well use them for ground missions too. All that is of course a double edged sword, since managing bases all around the world, and multiple combat missions can be very mentally taxing and frankly sometimes tedious. The greater degree of possible destruction also is great. There is a much greater weapon selection, not limited to arbitrary classes, even just the basic weapons include great stuff like an autocannon that can fire incendiary and HE shells, allowing you to do stuff like just burning down the barn instead of having to send out a fire team over an open field next to the alien craft and plenty of cover to clear it. Even grenades have much higher flexibility, by being able to set a timer, instead of them instantly blowing up, allowing stuff like sending in the rookie into the alien craft with the grenade already ticking, so if they predictably get shot the second they go through the door, they just drop the grenade on the floor, which will probably kill a good chunk of the aliens that killed them, and the resulting dust and debree will give whoever gets to go next some concealment. Another thing you can do is a bucket chain where you pass along the hot grenade along a line of troopers from the one guy that still has a relevant grenade (incendiary, smoke, high explosive, you get your moneys worth) to where it needs to go. Chryssalids also have never been more scary. All in all its a flawed game but incredibly enjoyable, and it holds up to this day. I have no clue how many hours ive played it since open XCOM isnt through steam, but it certainly is many. Long war is great too but thats not where my autism took my train of thought

Jagged Alliance 2 is a good pick for another strategy game that lets you get "Alot of bodies on the field" because you can deploy 2 full seperate squads to the same mission which is 16 people if memory serves