Sorry, I dropped off.
Playing Dynamic War with 50% scaling, on Normal cause all the tooltips about Difficulty rating scared me. They shouldnt have.
LW plays exactly like the Original, to be honest. All the new fluff doesnt change much tactically.
In fact, I get the feeling that the roaming pods (is that new? especially on Harvester ships) make the vanilla's safe and ideal movement of 1 tile per turn or 1 cover per turn and Overwatch spam even worse. I've won my first landed Harvester by standing still in cover. And then triggerign the Outsiders.
Balance changed. Rocketeers got nerfed something serious. Now Infantry is top imo, can shoot twice per turn on the very first level! And the next two Abilities are also extremely useful. Overwatch without penalties? Yes, please! Its interesting, because at first I thought it was a good ability but after I picked it up, I realized that Overwatch usually triggers in the Open which bumps Crits to +50% if enemy "flanked"! This makes this ability 1A Great. You can trigger a pod with a scout and run back to entrenched Infantry in Overwatch and keeep on Winninnn!
Injuries recovery is far too much. Organically, I developed 3 squads and a forth that might as well be rookie level. I wish they'd shorten it by a lot.
Some DLC missions are insane. The Asian Mafia Man with some Artefact had to be saved through !30! Thinman with 6 guys. Its insane... I had to reload and and camp around to figure out what triggers them. If this was on a timelimit.... good night.
Then his next mission is a train station, that has to be beat by sneaking on the edge and triggering all required locations at once, or you will lose soldiers.
And the followup is a ?Dreadnought? spaceship with a pod of 6 Mutons. Doable but I sent my 3rd squad...
Thinking about quitting. I dont think Psi or Genmods (half of which I've already seen through saving and experimenting) or Meks are gonna change the tedious pressing of 3... If only it stayed on 3 alwyas....
I have 5 soldiers of each class. Before getting Annette and the others.
I think most keep an even larger roster, mine does feel small at times, I had to skip a couple of missions in order not to remain unprotected (I want to contain my roster to use only unique voices, which takes mods too). Yours is small anyway.
I've started another run after doing one at easy... I thought I was burned out with the game but I'm having more fun that before.
Some DLCs missions are truly hard, yes.... but this time around I've managed to do the Asian Man mission on the first try with no injuries even, IIRC. You need to keep all your squad in the starting spot, cover them well, and let the aliens come at you. Use overwatch, snipers, high aim gunners if you have any, and rocketeers. Perhaps don't even bring assaults on that mission.
In general, learn to truly specialize your troops and make good use of them. For instance, make a couple of INSANELY high movement scouts with concealment (with the right gear and level ups even more than 20-22) use them as hidden spotters and pick your enemies from afar with true snipers. Use specialized sappers to reliably destruct cover and clean up groups of enemies with
In The Zone snipers. I managed to take down like 6 uber-exalts with my ITZ Sniper a couple of days ago, following a carefully placed grenade. And so on. Plenty of good and fun tactics to use, even though yep, it can be pretty unforgiving at times. Do refer to the Long War wiki, lots of good info there.
Oh, and try to research things at the right time. Prioritize things you need like right now. Sacrifice the rest, they'll come once your position has gotten stronger.
And oh, The Dynamic option sort of screws up the balance anyway.
