29
u/ohfucknotthisagain 2d ago edited 2d ago
Probably.
The air game works differently in Long War. You need more aircraft, and you need to upgrade weapons as soon as possible. Right now, you need to get satellites online so you can detect and intercept UFOs.
Aircraft take priority over Workshops. Those Workshops and the generator powering them could have been a few more interceptors.
Planes generate missions, which provide cash and XP. Nothing provides a higher return on investment than an interceptor that you'll actually use.
If you have excessive repair times, move the damaged aircraft to another continent and buy replacements. Replacements are delivered within a few days. Keep doing this. Eventually, you'll have enough. You'll know you're at that point when you can swap damaged planes for repaired planes immediately.
Finally, know which UFOs to intercept and when to kill them:
- Scouts at NOE altitude will land, and landed UFOs provide more resources than crashes. Also, there's zero repair time if you don't intercept. Win-win.
- You can generally ignore Fighters/Destroyers (purple overlay) at NOE altitude if your air force is under pressure. Those will be bombing runs, and a little panic isn't much of a threat.
- UFOs automatically fail their missions if they take >=50% damage, so you can retreat from those nasty Fighters/Destroyers at any altitude if your air force is stretched thin. The explosion effects indicate that the UFO has reached this point.
- High altitude missions are threats to your satellites and must be dealt with.
- Low altitude UFOs may be satellite hunters, and the aliens get a "free" high altitude satellite attack sortee if the hunt succeeds. If the hunter is too tough to handle, you can let it go & gamble that the high-altitude attacker will be easier to handle.
- Leave the Large UFOs alone until you get Firestorms or advanced weaponry. Preferably both.
8
u/Kered13 2d ago
Low altitude UFOs may be satellite hunters, and the aliens get a "free" high altitude satellite attack sortee if the hunt succeeds. If the hunter is too tough to handle, you can let it go & gamble that the high-altitude attacker will be easier to handle.
Low altitude UFOs are Scout and high altitude UFOs are hunts. Also hunt UFOs will almost always be at least as strong if not stronger than Scout UFOs, so never ignore the Scout UFO.
1
u/sbr32 2d ago
I don't think never, or always, are very useful words in games like there. There are too many moving parts and variable for something to ever be 0%, or 100%, correct every time.
I'm not very good at the game, but if I have only 2 planes available in my Hanger and am a bit behind the curve in the air game I am very likely to ignore the Scout mission. If I get my last 2 Interceptors shot up by the scouting UFO i have a 0% chance to shoot down the hunt mission, whereas if I ignore the scout I still have a chance to shoot down the hunt, even if it is a tougher engagement.
9
u/Kered13 2d ago
That logic is exactly backwards. If you have 2 interceptors available, you attack the Scout mission. You will be much more likely to succeed, and if you stop the Scout mission there is no Hunt mission. If you ignore it you are just forcing yourself to take a harder Hunt mission that you will probably fail and lose a satellite.
If you fail the Scout mission, it is completely irrelevant that you have no Interceptors for the Hunt mission. You would have lost it anyways.
The only situations I can imagine where you would ignore the Scout mission are if you have no Interceptors available, or you are intentionally fishing for bigger UFOs for more resources. Which is not a strategy anyone should attempt unless they just want to make the game harder.
1
u/ohfucknotthisagain 1d ago
That's technically correct but probably confusing to a newbie.
I described the scout mission as a satellite hunt to avoid confusion with the scout ship class. That write up was targeted at someone with limited knowledge of the game mechanics.
2
u/1863952 1d ago
Holy shit. This post is a god damn life saver. I have been playing and the DREAD I get when there’s a UFO because of the 40+ day repair times and the lost aircraft have been driving me mad…
You are a life saver
2
u/ohfucknotthisagain 1d ago
It is almost always better to retreat a heavily damaged interceptor than to lose it.
Anti-satellite missions have a chance to fail equal to 2X the percentage of damage dealt to the UFO. Obviously, 50% damage is a good stopping point because the mission has a 100% chance of failure, but I'd stop at 40% or 45% rather than risk losing an interceptor.
Think of it this way: The base prices for interceptors and satellites are both $200. But when you lose an interceptor, you also lose the pilot XP and the installed weapon.
You can also pre-build spare satellites so you're ready to launch immediately if one is shot down. I usually try to do this, but money is tightest at the beginning of the campaign, so it's more of a mid-game thing.
1
u/Playful-Parsnip-3104 1d ago
You can generally ignore Fighters/Destroyers (purple overlay) at NOE altitude if your air force is under pressure. Those will be bombing runs, and a little panic isn't much of a threat.
Not quite as simple as this. It's easy to think that "a little panic" doesn't matter in the moment, but for the long-term success of a campaign it's important. Each country that withdraws from the council due to panic provides an ongoing boost to the aliens which adds up over the months, making missions more difficult. Losing too many countries early can be very tough.
A better and simpler rule of thumb is simply: in nearly all instances, if you think you can shoot down a UFO (which isn't going to land), you should. Over time you'll learn to assess how likely it is you can shoot down a given UFO with the interceptors you have available, and this is one of the important skills to develop as you play the game. For example, there's no point getting your only 3 interceptors damaged trying to shoot down a destroyer if the chances of success were minuscule anyways. In a few instances you know you'll want to save your interceptors for something else (like when a scout escapes and you know a satellite hunter is about to appear), but these are unusual and specific circumstances.
And every UFO mission is resources and XP for your troops, especially your lower-ranked ones. You have to balance that against the importance of keeping your interceptors ready for something else at any given moment. Sometimes it's more important to get the mission. Sometimes your barracks isn't in a good state to do the mission, but you should still shoot down the UFO anyway to (e.g.) stop it destroying your satellite.
9
u/SameIdea70 2d ago
Ineveitably you will lose contries so dont worry about it. Honestly are you still having fun cause thats the only thing that matter to gaming because this is very survivable on normal, id reccomend trying to win from behind to sharpen your skills when the game has the boot on your neck . But if you aren't the restart nobody's is affected besides you so your opinion is the only one that has any weight
4
u/Praecant 2d ago
Oh yeah no i'm absolutely still having fun I'm just like "Oh wow i've never had 0 satellites" in all my years of trying to beat long war.
Its the lack of any incoming funding or ways to prevent Panic thats making me worry if anything. I COULD sell off a bunch of resources/bodies I have but wary because i still want to field MECs before the end of the year especially since the game is already throwing Mechtoids and Berzerkers.
2
u/Playful-Parsnip-3104 1d ago
Council funding is really minor. Most of your disposable income comes from missions and artifact sales. Council funding is mostly there to cover your upkeep costs.
4
u/Kered13 2d ago
Losing three countries is totally fine. You could even lose four or five and be fine.
But having no satellites in August is extremely bad. And you said you couldn't put enough aircraft in the air to defend them, that means that you have not purchased enough aircraft. You need to rebuild your satellites ASAP and buy more aircraft. Sell whatever resources you need to on the grey market to afford these. You may need aircraft upgrades at this point as well.
Overall, assuming that your barracks and tech is fine, this is still winnable, but you are on the cusp of a doom spiral and need to turnaround the air game immediately.
There is a small silver lining. It looks like the aliens are targeting USA next. This means you are probably going to see bombing run missions in the upcoming months in addition to the normal set of scouting and hunting missions. More UFOs => More missions => More money => More aircraft. However this requires that you are actually able to intercept these UFOs and successfully raid the crash sites, while still keeping up with all of your other monthly missions. If you cannot keep up with the UFOs and missions, I don't think you'll be able to turn this around.
1
u/Praecant 2d ago
I need to expand on the inability to field more planes
When I say they kept sending more UFOs over and over, I mean legit for about two months worth of time I would finish a UFO mission, click scan, and immediately get another one with almost no break in between. There was a week where I had legit 10 UFOs and I believe June was 20 something in total. I don't know if it's really bad luck and they just focused entirely on the West hemisphere or what.
I did post a picture of what everything is equipped with right now and I have a significant amount of Phoenix cannons (with Gauss upgrade) and laser cannons.
as for selling things to re-buy and upgrade, what should I sell? I do have a significant stockholding of elerium, fragments, and meld "for later".
1
u/Playful-Parsnip-3104 1d ago
There was a week where I had legit 10 UFOs and I believe June was 20 something in total. I don't know if it's really bad luck
You're looking at this backwards. UFO missions give you important resources and are perfect for XP due to the "see Outsider" bonus. Most players would consider getting loads of early UFO shootdowns to be a great thing. Missing out on those missions because you failed to shoot them down, you got the overkill cash bounty instead, or they didn't appear in the first place would normally be a bad thing.
1
u/Kered13 1d ago edited 1d ago
June and July are usually the hardest months in the campaign in terms of the number of missions and you're ability to deal with them.
But remember that you don't have to shoot down every UFO. Only Scouting and Hunting missions, and optionally Bombing Runs if you're being ambitious. In one month you can have at most 6 Scouts, 4 Hunts, and 3 Bombing Runs (this assumes you stop all the Scouting missions, so that they don't spawn followup Hunting missions). This happens if the aliens are at max resources and max that level. From how it sounds like your campaign is going, they are probably not at this level. Turning a country heavily drains the aliens resources for the next month, and you have to be shooting down most UFOs to be at max threat level. So you're probably looking at something more like 8 UFOs that you need to shoot down, and 2 optional. The other UFOs will be on other missions, like Harvest or Research (which you should attack on the ground, not the air), or Abduction or Terror missions, which are always large UFOs that you can't shoot down until very late in the game (and these missions can also be handled on the ground).
as for selling things to re-buy and upgrade, what should I sell? I do have a significant stockholding of elerium, fragments, and meld "for later".
Whatever you need to in order to buy the aircraft and upgrades that you need. You might look ahead to see what foundry or engineering projects you have coming to set aside those resources, but absolutely everything else can be sold. Honestly it sounds like you probably were not selling enough in the early game. You should be selling most of your salvage in the early game to fund your air force. The grey market is your primary source of income. Mid and late game you have to start saving some, but if you're not using the grey market you will fall far behind.
3
u/Praecant 2d ago edited 2d ago
So I've been doing a run (Normal, no EXALT) and we are currently near the end of August. The first few months were somewhat of a breeze, however suddenly the Ayyyys decided they would send UFO after UFO after UFO and eventually my planes were so fatigued that i just could not field them for 2 weeks, would get some back, have another UFO attack, and then lose a Satellite. Lost European coverage, got it back, lost it again. Eventually (as of last week in game), 3 back to back scanners just popped in and shot down all my satellites while my planes were fully in repair. I do have Gauss weapons (as of last week also), trying to work on getting MECs and right now trying to finally get the key.
We're at 36/47 soldiers who aren't wounded (~5 of each class). No SHIVs yet. And I still haven't actually FAILED a mission yet.
1
u/Playful-Parsnip-3104 1d ago
You look fine, but I would always build labs before workshops. Labs provide a cumulative acceleration to all research. The earlier you get them and the more you get, the earlier you get to important tech. No point in having loads of workshops if you can't build important items because they're still gated behind your lagging research.
2
1
u/Upper-Meringue-1574 2d ago
Yes, in Long War once an country withdrawn from XCOM project, the alien will establish their command base in that country. You have to deploy satelite in that country for a while before attempt to assault the alien base (if I remember). Once their base destroyed, that country will return to the project
1
1
u/GumboMumbo49 2d ago
Maybe if you get some satellites online you might be able to salvage this. But it has to right now.
1
u/kiman9414 1d ago
Start selling them corpses for money! Realistically it is only over when all ur legit troops are dead.
1
u/Idoubtyourememberme 1d ago
Only 3 losses? Not only is this recoverable, you are doing extremely well!
1
u/Unlikely_Jockey 1d ago
It massively depends on what difficulty you're playing on. Like if I were to jump in on this particular save would I be able to salvage it? Probably no if it's any higher than was it brutal I think. However, if you're on whatever easy is I think it's normal in longmore. Yeah you can. You can sell it to that. It'll be really hard really hard. You're probably so behind but yeah yeah you can do it
0
u/punkcukor 2d ago
Man is it that bad? I bought the game like 5 days ago after playing xcom2 for 300 hours. I thought I could easily win the game on classic difficulty, but after seeing this post maybe it was a bit too hard for me xd
3
u/AardvarkFearless5747 2d ago
Note: this is the Long War mod. It’s way more intense, in a good way, than the regular game.
56
u/MeatExciting6540 2d ago
You only need one country. You good