XCOM 2 – Early Game Strategic Tips / Long War of the Chicks (LWOTC)

Useful tips.

You can do whatever you want in any order. The whole point of LongWar is to break the monotony of vanilla and allow you to branch out in any direction. Building a GTS will allow you to train some of the rookies you want first and train officers sooner.

But you could be missing out on some important early-game revenue without color.

General points

1. Like in vanilla XCOM 2, I find the mag weapons to be very beneficial in a hurry. One important thing to note is that in LWOTC you actually have to craft every weapon and armor piece, just like in XCOM 1. I personally skip laser weapons altogether to save stuff on my composites and magnetics.
2. You don’t have to do every mission that comes up. If you have the manpower and infiltration time to go in and do a mission, by all means.. but don’t throw your squads into a light-moderate activity mission thinking you can make it through with no casualties. can.
3. You must be very hungry in a long battle. For the first few months you will likely find yourself spending all of your supplies immediately after collecting a drop.. This is why it is important to liberate areas and advise a soldier of your whereabouts. Stay so spies don’t destroy your income. (I didn’t know this in my first playthrough. Imagine my shock when I collected 1700 supplies in one month and it said “-955 unknown reason” in missing supplies…)
4. Don’t sell dead bodies. Especially the dead bodies of the officers. Almost every proven terrestrial object requires a corpse to research it and a corpse to make it. Skull Jack is the most prominent. For this reason you should always try and do missions with the “complete salvage” tag as these are the only ones where you can collect corpses.
5. Liberate an area as soon as possible. You won’t discover the Avatar Project until you liberate an area. The project is still ongoing even if you haven’t discovered it yet… so the sooner you liberate an area the sooner you can start fighting the death watch again.
6. Overall, Long War requires a lot more patience and planning than vanilla. You’ll likely fail on your first try (or several, if you’re me). Don’t let it discourage you. Long War is definitely the best way to enjoy this game.

Note: If you are having problems with the game, read this article: Crash after the first mission. This will help you get rid of crashes and freezes in the game on startup.

Building proposals

The first 3 tech orders are not that important. It’s the latter route that is a bit more descriptive. It seems that people either skip the laser weapons via psi-ops and rely on direct magnetics, or do more traditional laser openers in which case the psi ops are very delayed and possibly not at all. are also not used.

For the psi ops rush it goes something like this:

• Comm
• Modular weapons
• Alien Biotech
• Sectoid autopsy
• Psychology
• soldier
• officer
• magnetic

The buildings will be:

The minimum requirement for this street is to capture the Illyrium core and not destroy the sectoid corpse on the gatecrashers and some high/very intel rookies. It also requires at least 2 scientists so short of mission luck, you have to buy scientists from the black market for the first 2 months of the game. I usually do this regardless of the psi ops rush but just to let them know there are 200 more supplies.

When I started LWOTC I was completely sold on this street and since then I have significantly preferred the lower alternative as the power curve is much smoother. There is a window along the street above where the muton force is around level where you still don’t have magnetic material and basically all missions require 7 men for safety or to cripple a game. There is danger.

The 2nd strat has a much smoother power curve and is something like this:

• Comm
• Modular weapons
• Alien Biotech
• soldier
• Laser
• Advanced lasers

The buildings will be:

I usually try to rush PG and build 3-4 Spark units as soon as possible. But every spark beyond the first is very resourceful. I sell every basic PCS and weapon mods, datapads and extra corpses early game. Like psi ops, they are super strong when leveling on curves but slightly weaker if you delay them.

I play on cmdr and I think spark B/O runs much smoother than psi ops B/O personally. Maybe psi ops B/O is a little more viable at lower diffs because psi ops training time is a little shorter and you get a few more days before advent force level increases.

I believe laser works in psi lab too although it takes psi lab a bit longer but less to get the initial +3 avenger power mission bonus, I don’t think you can play both psi ops heavy and spark heavy can plan. It’s either or.

In my personal experience, grenadiers are very weak in psi ops B/O while sparks are weak in tech B/O so I [commander’s choice mod] More of one or the other depending on my B/O plans.

While my tactical layer gameplay has changed drastically over the few hundred hours I’ve sunk into LWOTC, I’d say my strategic layer is what held me back in the first place. After finding out about counter mission conditions, I started aggressively mission farming in max 1-2 areas at a time while essentially shutting down all other areas. I often delay the contact of other areas until the strength in the initial area is too high to delay the development of another selected contact/level. But as a result, I was always starved for intel and resources due to the limited mission selection and rarely did more than 6 missions per month. Nowadays I hardly ever close an area, I aggressively contact neighboring areas very quickly and leave the intel running. As a result, I have to deal with a lot of dark events but I almost always have to deal with selective retaliation on cooldown.