Key frame animation tutorial. Now that the new, humungous XCOM 2 expansion pack has had a couple of weeks to bed in, the game’s mod community has been steadily fixing up their tweaks to work with War of the Chosen [official site]. Over time, there’ll be more Steam Workshop offerings which take specific advantage of the onslaught of changes WOTC introduces, but right now what I’m interested in is assorted quality of life improvements that remove pointless dead time from the game, offer more tactical detail and generally make the whole shebang slicker and quicker to use.
These, then, are the XCOM 2 War Of The Chosen mods that I just don’t think I could do without. (Well, I could, but I’d be complaining the whole damn time).
Quick note first – if you’ve yet to indulge in the many pleasures and improvements of WOTC, as detailed in my XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen review, but are knee-deep in XCOM 2, you’ll hopefully be not unhappy to hear that most of these mods work in the base game too. However, they do require a separate version of each mod, so check the title and description before you install it.
General housekeeping too, in case you’re new to the Steam Workshop – just click the ‘Subscribe’ button on the Steam page for any of these you like the look of, and it’ll be downloaded and updated automatically. You then need to click the checkbox next to the name of any mod you want to run from the XCOM 2/WOTC launcher the next time you fire it up.
Early hours with an XCOM game tend to entail using your soldiers one by one each turn – move and shoot, next, move and shoot, and so forth. But by the time you’re a few dozen hours in, you’re thinking about them as a squad rather than a set of individuals, which means Tab-to-switch-soldier is your most-used button. Checking, checking, checking – who can do what, who still has actions left, which skills have recharged, who’s wounded or otherwise vulnerable… Tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, many times before you commit to any moves at all. If only XCOM 2/WOTC had an at-a-glance way of seeing everyone’s sitrep, and jumping directly to specific units. Well, here you go.
It takes up a bit of screen space by shoving a row of soldier faces, overlaid with various statuses, at the top right, but it’s well worth it for the time saved. I use it less for switching straight to certain units, and more just as a super-speedy reminder of who’s still in play – it saves a ton of time each turn, and strikes me as something the official and weirdly fragmentary X2/WOTC UI could really benefit from.
Yes, yes, the ‘ant’s nest’ base mode is an impressive sight, especially with WOTC’s various room, propaganda poster and soldier costuming additions, but by God 98% of the visual side of it has zero bearing on playing the game. Slowly panning and zooming around it eats up so much time (exacerbated by the sheer number of interruptions in global view mode), and all it really means is that you’ll see the animations thousands of times across the course of a campaign. This mod rips all the room transitions away – click on a button and you’ll go directly to, say, the Research or Engineering screen. It’s less fancy, and I’m sure it breaks a few artists’ hearts, but it’s so much more efficient. I’d love for this to simply be a togglable option in the game’s official settings.
A returning favourite for many of us XCOM 2 vets, and I’m frankly staggered that WOTC didn’t include an official option for this. All it does is add one extra button to your soldiers’ action quickbars. All that button does is immediately and simultaneously trigger evacuation (er, to a chopper, not of bowels) for any of your units who are currently stood in a mission Evac zone.
If you’ve ever been through the pain of solemnly clicking Evac seven times on hostage/VIP missions, you’ll know what a tiny godsend this is. The cherry on top is that seeing your whole squad boost into the skies in tandem makes for a far more dramatic finish to a mission than doing it one by one.
Given that XCOM 2/WOTC is supposed to concern a global resistance against evil alien overlords, your soldiers hail from a rather small pool of countries, and it’s not long before their names start to become rather homogeneous. This mod adds dozens more nations into the database, as well as many more names to pull from when the game auto-generates new recruits. A Russian soldier will, by and large, have a more Russian-sounding name now, for instance.
Visually, this is only really apparent in the little flags that appear in Armory and soldier bio screens, but it really amps up both the planet-wide feel and the variety of your resistance effort.
N.b. this mod is a combo of two other modders’ efforts – More Nations Mod 1.0 by Astograph and Immersive Names 1.4 by DaggaRoosta, so you could as an alternative install one or both of those separately.
Forgive this its passive-aggressive title – it’s an extremely welcome, if not vital, time-saver for anyone who, like me, has put hundreds of hours into XCOM games by this point. While a combination of patches and WOTC itself has shown the worst of XCOM 2’s weird mid-mission delays and pauses the door, many more still remain. Oftentimes these involve the game telling an attentive player what’s already perfectly obvious, or making too much fuss at showing certain outcomes that, again, a seasoned player can take in with a glance.
SWMT says goodbye to the likes of post-grenade pauses, not-exciting-the-four-hundredth time enemy reveal cinematics and a few of Captain Obvious Bradford’s unskippable observations, as well as speeding up Gremlin and Avenger movement times. Frankly, ‘Stop Making Me Lose My Mind’ might be a better title for this essential.
More about tidying things up than adding or removing things that should/shouldn’t be there, but with the net result of making WOTC feel more unified with XCOM 2 than a layer on top. In the unmodded expansion, soldiers have one of two different skill upgrade screens, depending on which part of the game you’ve reached it from, plus some skills can only be bought with Ability Points if you access the screen from a particular room. This makes it so that the new, slicker, horizontal skill screen is what you see wherever you go, and if you want to buy bonus powers with AP you no longer have to perform the base view dance first to do so.
This one’s a lot more useful for less experienced XCOM 2ers than monstrously battle-scarred veterans such as I, but it has saved me from a few complacency-based fatal errors nonetheless. Essentially, what this does is add a few interface elements that give you a better sense of what situation one of your soldiers will find themselves in if they move to a square you’re hovering the cursor over – if they have line of sight to or will flank an enemy, if snipers’ squadsight will activate, if they’re going to trigger an enemy’s overwatch and similar. It takes a lot of the guesswork and memorisation out of things – though, if you played X2 through a couple of times before tackling WOTC, your guesswork and memorisation should be pretty reliable anyway. (Plus, patches + WOTC have already introduced a few more ways of seeing what’s going to happen before you commit).
For me, Gotcha’s additional quality of life additions, such as directional arrows for VIP locations and hackable stations, are the big win.
There are and will be many more best War of the Chosen mods, of course – please do point ’em out below. Or, if none of these sound like they’ll make the XCOM 2 to your taste, see if you can find a more appealing meat grinder in our 50 best strategy games round up.
Mora Nations is a mod for XCOM 2, created by Astograph
Description:
Adds more nationalities to the game as if they were always included, with:
-Flags
-Names and surnames (21000+ across 87 custom namelists)
-A custom rebalance of all the game's countries' UnitWeight (chance of showing up), even for default nations. See the ReadMe for UnitWeight details.
The overall goal is to include all UN members, some other sovereign countries (e.g. Kosovo, Transnistria) and some territories (e.g. Greenland, Puerto Rico).
COMPATIBILITY
MNM is compatible with other nation mods, even if they add the same nations, due to MNM countries and namelists using a unique identifier in the code. However, you would obviously end up with duplicate nations.
Installation:
Extract into „SteamAppscommonXCOM 2XComGameMods” and activate in game’s menu.
Report problems with download to [email protected]
Posted by2 years ago
Archived
Welcome to Long War 2 Commander,
Update:Follow this linkbefore launching the game to avoid a glitchy start
There is VERY good news for players who run a modded XCOM2 game and are interested in whether they will be able to run their favorite mods with Long War 2. In a very general sense the majority of existing XCOM2 mods are either compatible, or mildly incompatible, right out of the gate. The mods that will need tweaking are the ones that change gameplay mechanics, rely on in-game text, or are simply in need of some alignment/balancing to be compatible. There are some mods that duplicate mechanics in Long War 2 and you will not want to run them simultaneously, this is true for all of the other Long War Studios (now Pavonis Interactive) mods. Do not run them with Long War 2, their functionality is included in the game and running them at the same time will likely break the game.
My suggestion for your first campaign is to play with a few choice Quality of Life (QoL) mods with as many customization mods as you’d like, or better yet is to do a straight “Vanilla” Long War 2 campaign with only LW2 installed. This is mainly to help you get your bearings and allow you to set a baseline of experience with the Long War 2 mod without affecting the game’s balance.
Many mod authors have already expressed interest in making their mods compatible (or making entirely new mods), so it is good practice (and frankly, good manners) to allow them time to catch up with all of the changes in the mod. Spamming every mod’s discussion threads within hours of Long War 2’s release with the same question, “IS YOUR MOD COMPATIBLE!?!?!?” is just silly, and annoying, and don’t be that guy. They are volunteers spending their time to create something and then giving it to you for free. Chill out. They want some time to play Long War 2 as well.
The following mods are generally compatible from Day 1:
These mods will require anywhere from minor changes, to major overhauls by the mod author to achieve compatibility:I am not experienced enough with modding to know specifically what needs to be fixed with each mod, and as I note below, this is a very loose guideline meant for mod authors and users on Launch Day not an exhaustive list of bugs, or suggested fixes.
Note: There are very few mods that do not work at all, and the mod authors will decide whether they want to make the changes necessary to make the mod compatible. Keep in mind that some mods (like Free Camera Rotation) that did not work with the Long War Toolbox,or other LWS mods, work fine with Long War 2.
Here are my recommended mods for your first run through of Long War 2, bearing in mind that a un-modded campaign is the best possible choice:
This is the core of my QoL mods:
For a faster paced game, i.e. less animations, add these mods (be forewarned these mods can cause some very minor graphical glitches that don't affect gameplay, but you may notice inconsistency, weapons on-screen may appear misaligned during a soldier's actions for example)
For helpful on-screen tactical information pickONEof these three:
Optional QoL mods (because they are awesome and/or helpful):
Starting Your First Campaign
Overview
If you notice any in game bugs make note of them, and restart your game, a lot of bugs/glitches are fixed with a save/reload.
Finally, have fun, I'm certain that additional mods will be coming very soon, and old favorites will be compatible before you know it. The developers of Long War 2 care a great deal about the modding community, and everyone has the same goal in mind, create great content and enhance every player's game. Be patient with mod creators, and enjoy the game.
There is a link below to the working document that I used to keep track of all of the mod compatibility testing for over 500 mods, it is not meant to be taken as gospel, and since I've been testing on and off during my 5 months playtesting Long War 2 some of the information could be months old. It is meant as an informal guide for players and mod authors to get a sense of where a specific mod lands in relation to Long War 2 at the time of launch. There are only a few Voicepacks and Customizations on the list because they are all basically compatible. Bear in mind that I could be completely wrong about a mod, or change in LW2, or the mod, or the base game, could have occurred since I wrote my notes. Nothing here is definitive and is meant for entertainment purposes only. ;)
I’ll repeat myself one last time, don’t spam the mod authors or harass them about Long War 2 compatibility, they are volunteers and have lives to lead.
Appendix:
Long War 2 on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=844674609
On Nexus: http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom2/mods/633/?
Deacon's Mod Compatibility list here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e7YrjDSl95Hmt1ZPSlsBStvQk95uLX_KcmWS4OoDBak/edit#gid=0
Pavonis Interactive forum here: http://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=15
Fellow balance advisor and beta tester /u/JoINrbs YouTube channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpjr4aOTbpvat8Y77e8dd_Q and Twitch is here: https://www.twitch.tv/joinrbs
/u/JoINrbs Tutorials here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/5ox1i5/lw2_my_day_one_tutorials_exploration_vids/
Fellow balance advisor and beta tester /u/xwynns YouTube channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmJ_ggMdRJJ9YRe9dUU3kYQ
Fellow balance advisor and beta tester /u/WyMANderly has created: LW2: Visualization of how Hit Chance, Crit Chance, and Dodge interact using the 'hack bar' as a template
/u/xwynn's tutorial video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn78E_7ZJes
192 comments
Long War is a fan-made partial conversion mod for the turn-based tactics video game XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its expansion, XCOM: Enemy Within. It was first released in early 2013, and it exited beta at the end of 2015. Almost every aspect of the original game is altered, creating a longer, more complex campaign that presents players with more strategic choices and customization options. Long War adds a significant number of new soldier classes, abilities, weapons, armors, and usable items, and also introduces new features, including soldier fatigue and improvements to alien units over the course of the game.
The mod was developed by Long War Studios, a team that came to include four core members, with assistance from 29 contributors, 20 voice actors, and three members of Firaxis Games, including the developer of Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. According to one of the mod's core developers, Amineri, the mod started as a series of changes to the base game's configuration file, and grew more expansive as the team's capabilities grew. By the end of the mod's development, the team was working directly with the Unreal Development Kit, and had created a Java-based tool to help manage the changes that the mod was making.
Long War has received praise from both video game journalists and from the developers at Firaxis. It has been downloaded over 840,000 times, by over 500,000 different users. Firaxis took the popularity of Long War to add built-in support for modding into the sequel XCOM 2, and used Long War Studios to provide initial add-ons for the game at release. On 19 January 2017, Long War Studios, now known as Pavonis Interactive, released Long War 2 for XCOM 2.[1]
Long War[edit]Background and development[edit]
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a turn-based tactics video game developed by Firaxis Games and released in October 2012. In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the player assumes the role of the commander of a secret multinational military organization, XCOM, as it fights off an invasion by a numerically and technologically superior invading alien force. The player directs the organization's research and development, manages its finances, and controls its soldiers in combat.[2][3]XCOM: Enemy Within is an expansion of Enemy Unknown, and was released in November 2013. Enemy Within added two additional ways for players to upgrade their soldiers - through genetic modification and through cybernetic combat suits called MECs - as well as new alien units and a new enemy faction, a secret paramilitary organization called EXALT.[3]
Long War is a partial conversion mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Within.[4] It was first uploaded to NexusMods on 4 January 2013, and exited beta with the release of version 1.0 on 28 December 2015. The developers announced in July 2015 with beta 15f2 that they had finished adding new features, and that any future releases would only correct bugs or balance issues. At the time that it exited beta, the mod's development was led by four core members, JohnnyLump (John J. Lumpkin), Amineri (Rachel Norman), XMarksTheSpot, and Ellatan (Alex Rozenfeld). They were joined by four senior contributors, 20 voice actors, and 29 contributors assisting with programming, art, sound engineering, translations, research, and porting the mod to Mac and Linux. Three members of Firaxis Games also provided assistance.[5][a][6][7] The team released separate versions for Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within until the end of 2013, and thereafter only released versions for Enemy Within.[5][b]Long War has been downloaded from NexusMods over 900,000 times by over 333,000 separate users.[5]
First and foremost, the mod invites you to struggle through a longer, harsher campaign, but provides you with some new options to endure the prolonged alien assault.
— Christopher Livingston, covering the mod for PC Gamer[8]
The aim of the Long War mod is, in the words of its developers, to create 'much deeper strategic and tactical play and a greater variety of problems to throw at the player'.[5] The mod makes changes to many of the game's existing features, adds new concepts, and brings back concepts from the first game in the franchise, Julian Gollop's UFO: Enemy Unknown.[9] As the mod's name implies, a campaign in Long War takes significantly longer than a campaign in the unmodified game, with Eurogamer's Chris Bratt estimating it at around 150 hours. However, the mod does have an option that significantly shortens the campaign.[10](at 3:20)
According to Amineri, one of the mod's core developers, initial versions of Long War used changes to the game's configuration file to change content in the game. After other mod makers that were not part of the Long War project discovered how to make changes to the game by directly working with its Unreal Engine, more significant game alterations became possible, and the forums of NexusMods became a hub where such changes were exchanged.[11] Many of the mod's key features, including the increased number of soldiers and the lengthened campaign, first appeared in version beta 1.9, which was released in mid 2013. Shortly after Enemy Within released, Amineri and XMarksTheSpot completed development of a Java-based tool called upkmodder that allowed the team to more effectively manage and implement the changes made by the mod. In the late stages of the mod's development, the team worked directly with the Unreal Development Kit.[11]
Gameplay differences[edit]
Long War adds a large number of new weapons, suits of armor, and items. Every weapon and piece of equipment shown in this screenshot was added by the mod. Additionally, the soldier's class (Infantry) and many of the soldier's abilities are new content added by the mod.
Long War introduced several new concepts into the game. Soldiers that are sent on missions come back fatigued. If they are sent back out on another mission before resting off their fatigue, they return from the second mission with injuries. The combination of fatigue and much longer injury times requires players to maintain a larger number of soldiers.[8][10](at 2:10) The mod also adds improvements over time for the enemy forces. Over the course of the game, both the aliens and the EXALT paramilitary group introduced in Enemy Within conduct their own research, granting their units new abilities. The player has the opportunity to slow down this research by defeating the aliens or EXALT when they launch missions, and conversely the research happens faster when the player is unable to stop missions and when members of the council of nations that fund the player pull out of the council. It is difficult to halt their research completely, as the aliens capture a council nation early in the game and will occasionally launch missions with vastly superior forces that the player does not have a reasonable chance to defeat. The mod does add special missions that the player can launch to re-take council nations that have fallen under alien control.[10][12](at 3:45)
In the original game, players can initially field four soldiers at a time, which can be upgraded to six soldiers later in the game. In the mod, players begin the game able to deploy six soldiers, which can be upgraded to eight, with certain missions allowing the player to bring as many as twelve soldiers. The number of classes that the soldiers can be is doubled from four to eight, with each original class being split into two in the mod. Each class has a corresponding class of cybernetic MEC soldier that they can be upgraded into.[4][8][12] The mod also adds new classes of weapons including battle rifles, carbines, and sub-machine guns. These choices affect soldiers damage and movement compared to the assault rifle from the base game.[10](at 0:45) New usable items and armor types are also added.[4] The mod increases the number of soldier abilities and gives players three choices instead of two when selecting new abilities each time a soldier levels up. Additionally, some of the abilities that were only available to one class in the base game became available to other classes in the mod. The mod increases psionic abilities, and gives players access to psionics earlier than in the base game.[4][12] Underpinning all of these changes is a larger technology tree. Research also takes longer and has a higher cost.[8][10][12](at 1:20)
Reception[edit]
The developers of the base game have been effusive in their praise for Long War. XCOM 2 lead producer Garth DeAngelis said 'It's unbelievable what they did' and called it his 'go-to recommendation' for hardcore fans.[13] Jake Solomon, the lead designer of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, and Ryan McFall, the lead engineer for XCOM 2, praised the technical skill of the team behind Long War in a panel discussion at Firaxion.[14][15] Solomon, who recommended the mod in a tweet in 2014,[4] also praised the mod for adding so much content and for answering a desire within the player community. He called the base game 'basically a 20-hour tutorial for The Long War',[13] which Chris Bratt of Eurogamer considered an exceptionally strong recommendation for the mod.[10][c](at 0:00)
The mod has also been warmly received by video game journalists. Wired praised the amount of content added by the game and called it 'the absolute best way to play XCOM'.[12] In a video explaining the mod, Eurogamer's Chris Bratt also praised the amount of new content, but was especially appreciative that the mod forced players to develop new strategies instead of relying on the tactics they used in the base game.[10](at 1:20) Alec Meer of Rock, Paper, Shotgun complimented the mod for keeping the game fresh and capturing the feeling of surviving impossible odds, and gave the mod his strongest possible recommendation.[9] The mod was profiled in PC Gamer's 'Mod of the Week' feature in late 2014,[8] and in a separate piece a year later, the publication praised how much the team behind the mod was able to accomplish considering that the base game was not built to support modding.[15]Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Adam Smith, in an article announcing that the Long War team were in 'pre-Kickstarter development' of their own game, called Long War 'one of the best mods of all time'.[16]
By January 2017, the mod has been downloaded from Nexus Mods over 844,000 times.[17]
Legacy[edit]
In his article recommending the mod, Alec Meer of Rock, Paper, Shotgun speculated that the Long War mod influenced the development of XCOM 2.[9] One area where Long War's influence was acknowledged was in the decision to support modding. The development team recognized that Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within were exceptionally difficult to mod, and aimed to make modding more accessible in the sequel. At a panel with XCOM 2 developers, Ryan McFall remarked that 'we kind of watched in morbid fascination the Long War crew kind of hacking our game apart' before going on to provide a list of features and assets that would be available to people interested in modding XCOM 2.[14] Jake Solomon pointed to the successes of Long War and mods to games in the Civilization franchise in explaining the decision to support modding.[18][19]
Long War 2[edit]Development[edit]
Around mid-2016, the team behind the Long War mod adopted the name 'Long War Studios', and assisted Firaxis in providing some of the day-one add-ons for XCOM 2.[20]
By January 2017, Long War Studios announced they have changed their name to Pavonis Interactive, and among other projects, are working with Firaxis to bring a new mod, Long War 2, in the same vein as the original Long War, to XCOM 2.[17] The Long War 2 mod was released on January 19, 2017.[21]
Gameplay differences[edit]
Long War 2 makes significant changes to the XCOM 2 game, such as making the global mission selection screen, the Geoscape, a battlefield unto itself.[22] The mod adds a number of classes, some based on the add-ons previously developed by Pavonis.[21]
References[edit]
Notes
References
External links[edit]War 2.wistone.com
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Long_War_(mod)&oldid=886033389'
If you would like to play test Long War 2 [WOTC], first: thank you! It's much appreciated.
The game needs a lot of play testing to discover issues that appear later in a campaign than just within the first month. We also need to find out how it interacts with the new WOTC features, like the Chosen. We're particularly interested in game-breaking bugs or major balance issues.
To get up and running, just follow these instructions:
Some behaviour, like overwatch, is the same as vanilla WOTC rather than Long War 2. That will probably change in the future, but don't be surprised at seeing vanilla-like behaviour in some scenarios.
War 2 Free Strategy Game
Finally, have fun!
Note You can find previous versions of the mod here.
Reporting issues
You will encounter problems in the game. There are known ones already. If you would like to report an issue, please follow these steps:
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