Anyone played Enemy Within + the Long War mod? I watched some LP of the first month of it and it seems like it makes things much more interesting, but I dunno if it does anything to make the weak majority of EU (third month+ basically) better. This is a Steam sale related time sensitive question
Xenonauts has gotten itself in that "I know it will be a better and cheaper game in 6 months" state for me
Yes, I've played a lot of it, basically to the final mission.
Highlights:
Squad size now
starts at 6. The squad size increase upgrades are still available, and take it up to 8 for all missions. (Except a particular Exalt infiltration mission type that limits you to 4 soldiers.) There is a late-game upgrade to the Skyranger that ups the soldier cap per mission to 10-12 varying on mission type. It only applies to "special" missions, like invading alien bases, exalt bases, et cetera. All normal abduction/ship missions cap at 8.
Soldiers start out a lot weaker, especially in will. You'll miss much more, and even one point of damage can cause panic. Panic can chain very quickly on rookies, too. This panic effect tapers off pretty quickly with ranks, though, so it's just another "laugh at the horrible first mission fuckups" quality, though occasionally it rears its head and makes the game more interesting later on. There is also a basically free soldier item that eliminates panic chains from others taking damage/dying, costing a slot that would be used on grenades or medikits and so on.
Speaking of difficulty, play on Normal. Trust me. I play on Classic/Iron-Man and Impossible/Iron-Man in vanilla XEW without blinking, but they changed so many things under the hood here that difficulties above Normal are punishing, not a baseline challenging experience. The game feels close to Classic did originally on Normal in Long War, with the added caveat that difficulty scales much better throughout the game. This is my favorite change in Long War, actually. They added aliens upgrading their troops. This means as time goes on, alien troops improve, just as yours do. Even sectoids will see their HP increase. Leaders of alien packs (1 per "pod") have higher stats than the rest, and often have special abilities... like, say, Lightning Reflexes on a chrysallid, so all your reaction shots miss. Enjoy.
Aliens now act with a sort of independent agency on the globe. I know this still has to be scripted, but the effect is interesting. Essentially, aliens are always trying to perform missions and goals. Some of them are very important to the aliens, and you can't thwart them early on. For example, it is possible to see a battleship (the biggest ship in the game) flying over your continent in the first month. There's no way to shoot it down, or survive a capture mission on it. One really cool aspect of the aliens having goals: the invasion of XCOM's base is now based on your performance. If you're really kicking the alien's ass when you shouldn't be they get angry, and move up the base invasion. Apparently it also requires a ton of resources from them, so it's not a free scripted event to punish you, either.
You're expected to ignore threats that are beyond your capabilities. It's ordinary practice to straight-up ignore the first terror mission of the game. Which loses you a country automatically. Oh, I didn't mention that countries can now be taken back, did I? Alien bases are now a repeatable mission type you can perform on any country that has left XCOM to get it back into the fold. It uses the same map as before, so my god is it repetitive, but it's still a nice addition.
There's a ton of new research options/classes/weapons. If something existed in the original XCOM, chances are it's been changed.
Now, the bad. The interception minigame is in my opinion a mess. Early on, you'll struggle to take down the lightest alien craft with interceptors. The projects that improve your interceptors performance are hugely expensive and time-consuming, and the typical research path is railroaded into getting to Firestorm as soon as possible, because as before it represents a step up from "well we can barely keep order" to "we are destroying everything now". They wanted to make it so you're forced to choose between what you want to let through your defenses, but the end result isn't very fun. This is one of the very few things I modded myself when I played Long War. It just isn't very interesting to me to wait 7 days for a jet to refuel. (Yeah, you heard me. Not making that one up.)
There are still a few bugs, some gamebreaking. Late-game, a hex edit is required to make it so the overseer ship isn't always destroyed in interception. Another hex edit is required to allow MECs to use advanced weapons. Not a big deal if you're an enthusiast, but these bugs are being fixed in the next version along with a ton of new features, so you're probably better off waiting. If you enjoyed XCOM for what it was and have been away long enough for it to seem fresh, this mod will probably be a lot of fun for you. That's about all I can say about it.
Oh, and there's a Second Wave option to make Long War shorter. I didn't try it out, but you really should. My playthrough that got close to the end was clocking into the hundreds of hours--if you're a perfectionist and check out every UFO crash, you're looking at dozens of missions every month. Shit doesn't play around. It's called "Long" War for a reason.
