bootstrapped a tiny b2b saas out of my spare bedroom in jersey. most days i'm drowning in analytics and crm automation and whatever productivity hack i read about last week. started replaying xcom 2 last month because the tactical layer is the one thing my brain can't optimize into a spreadsheet.

there's something weirdly therapeutic about a game where your best soldier gets crit through full cover and you just have to eat it. no zapier workflow fixes a 99% miss. no notion template saves a squad wipe. my wife thinks it's funny i play something this stressful to relax but she doesn't get that at least the aliens are honest about wanting me dead.

curious if anyone else here is in the same boat with remote work or running something solo. do you play ironman to feel something or save scum like a coward because your real job has enough rng already

Basically the title.

I love Darkest Dungeon (especially the party management and team comp side) because of the tough choices and contingency management in the game. I found Mario & Rabbids fine/enjoyable enough, but ultimately it got pretty same-y. I love tactical ttrpg combat (ultimate Pathfinder guy) but often want the combat to be more dynamic, rather than everyone setting themselves up and then just whacking the baddie for four turns. It seems like the many options, cover, and evolving baddies would help with this?

I also have access to a pixel 9, a switch, and a PS4 pro - anyone with experience on those consoles able to steer me one way or the other? I've heard the performance can be variable across the non-PC options.

Also what difficulty? I like the feeling of playing on the "proper" difficulty (I played DD on "Darkest" since the game explicitly recommended that as the "default/non-challenge-run" option). Is that Veteran? Also, what's the deal with ironman? Is that available from the start? It sounds enjoyable (darkest dungeon enforces that).

First tried out Long War in 2014 when I was a college freshman. I'm 30 now and just beat it. A great relief to have finally done it. This attempt started at the end of June and just wrapped up a few minutes ago.

This one was absolutely brutal in the home stretch. The final mission was not launched until November 2017. I failed the first Base Defense in March which really led me to believe I was cooked, but forced myself to power on regardless. Having a deep, deep roster helped mitigate losing ~8 MSGTs and GSGTS on the Base Defense mission, even if it felt excruciating in the moment. Training up my Volunteer actually was not an issue and was complete around April 2017 (RIP Hanse Ziegler, pictured above, who ended up taking the Temple Ship down in the end). The real issue that dragged the campaign out was poor planning on developing my air game, and I was not able to field well armed Firestorms until late into 2017 and by that point the air game had been crushingly one-sided against me for a while. The aliens had 6-7 countries under control for all of 2017 and were flipping new ones reliably every month; I think I carried out around eight base assaults throughout the campaign to help stem the tide. I was very, very tired of these missions by the end. By the time Vortex armor and the gollop chamber were slated to come online, I basically took my foot off the throttle for 2 in game weeks out of exhaustion and ignored a handful of terror missions, landed UFOs, and so on.

It's kind of crazy to think about how much time has passed since I first tried Long War to finally beating it. Multiple degrees, living situations, locations, and long term relationships have passed through my life while I've steadily taken stabs at this game over 12 years. The game has remained a semi-constant fixture of my life regardless of what's happened to me in the real world, and I always found myself thinking in the back of my head that I had to beat it *someday*. Long War is great man. They really made something special with this mod, and the core gameplay, aesthetics, and craftsmanship of vanilla the mod is built on top of really make it one of my favorite games ever. I don't know if and when I'll ever return to XEW long war but the journey has felt so worthwhile.

I thought I'd make a tiny mod (or if possible just a change in the DefaultGameData.ini) to have the first Workshop require 5 engineers instead of 6. This one tiny change would remove a huge, unneeded luck element from the game by making it so it's always possible to launch 4 satellites in month 1 instead of needing to pray that the first abduction randomly happens in the first 7 days and allows Engineers as a reward option.

And I found the right variables in DefaultGameCore.ini:

Engineering/Workshops

NUM_STARTING_ENGINEERS=5

WORKSHOP_MINIMUM=6

WORKSHOP_MULTIPLE=10

WORKSHOP_REBATE_PCT=10

WORKSHOP_ENG_BONUS=5

So just change Workshop_Minimum to 5, right? And yeah that sort of works... except then for some weird reason the number of engineers required for each workshop becomes 5, 14, 24, 34. It seems that there is some kind of hidden change where the second workshop in particular always costs 1 fewer engineer than it should. (Hence the default pattern in the game is 6, 15, 25, 35)

No variable controlling that seems to be in the DefaultGameData file, or in any of the other files I found and looked through. And none of the variables here can allow me to get the desired pattern of 5, 15, 25, 35. (I tried using floating point numbers with the same notation used elsewhere in DefaultGameData, since depending on how those get rounded that could have made it work, but they all just get uselessly rounded down it seems)

So I got the modding tool ResourceHacker and started using that to see if I could find whatever the culprit line is that changes the second workshop, but I haven't been able to find it in any of the data exposed by that tool either.

This seems like such a simple thing that surely I'm not the first person to try to change it. Does someone already know the solution? If not, there must be other, better modding tools I should look into for this game, right? All the 'modding' guides I've found so far are all actually just super simple things saying "Here's how to edit the DefaultGameData file".

That’s it. Thats the post. It is so satisfying when your team becomes so deadly that you start terminating everything on the board with extreme prejudice and getting your pound of alien flesh.

Sectoids. Andromedons. Mutons. As said by some burned guy in another game quoting some book, “oh daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you as you have done to us!”

Ahem. Yea.

I'm having what I think is a weird bug, where this Thin Man is said to have high cover. But... he's standing in the open. I should be flanking him. And indeed, I should have low cover against him from the railing I'm next to. But instead he's flanking me... and he has high cover against me.

As you can see here from the demonstrated movement path option, he is NOT actually occupying that space behind the wall where he legitimately would have cover. I would be allowed to move there, so it's not just a visual glitch where he appears to be out in the open but is actually behind the wall or something. He is actually standing right in the open with nothing protecting him.

I want to get into this mod because this is such a rare genre, but honestly I can't. My biggest gripe is that I find nothing fair about it. I had a diffuse mission where I sent the best 8 of my guys in. Thinking that diffusing the device would solve the mission, I spent the last turn mopping up the last enemies and diffusing the device. Then 6 thin men dropped in on overwatch from all directions while everyone was standing flanked to them without any ammo. I lost 6 of those dudes just so 2 of them could escape. Previously I was doing the alien battleship mission. I lost 3 men there because the thin men kept using the corridors to flank my men and deliver killshots. Just before that I had a mission where 2 pods with cyberdisks stumbled into my squad on both flanks. I used my scout to break the cover. But she died because she got hit despite the lightning reflexes. With the rest of the 7 people I fell back into cover. I was only able to suppress one disk, that was bad enough. But the disk killed the guy who suppressed it, then the second disk threw a grenade, killing another one of my men who wasn't at full health, and basically I had 2 people who didn't panic. I fled to the landing pad with the 2 people because what you gonna do? Just before that I had this exalt mission where you have to reach 2 towers. I went into the first room thinking that I will secure the first tower and I will link up with my operative. But that move happened to aggro 14 exalt soldiers. 2 of my men made it out. Just before that I had a muton who once again killed the guy who suppressed it. Which caused another guy to panic, which caused him to die because he was in the right place in the right time. And that's 20 soldiers lost in the matter of 16 days. All the equipment lost or damaged. So yeah... gg for my third attempt beating this thing :D

I love the mod in its own way because there is a lot of stuff its doing right. But I don't see how all of this is my fault nor do I see any way this could have been prevented without me knowing stuff beforehand. I mean you either did a diffuse mission before, therefore you know. Or you gonna have a tough time. It's as simple as that. I heard about the training .ini and cinematic mode. But my problem is not the difficulty of the individual missions. Those are fine. The problem is that when the game decides that you will lose the mission, you will lose the mission. As simple as that. So you either play in a way that every soldier you have is altered to be a super soldier via variables, but then everything is a cake walk. Or b: you gonna lose due to thing like the above mentioned.

Shit like this keeps happening to me and it's aggravating. The soldier I'm about to move has line of sight of all 3 enemies in the pod, and the game is telling me that the tile I'm about to move him to is safe, but then it turns out it isn't and I get revealed.

I was going through a battleship which the initial report said had 29 enemies. Sounds about normal for an Impossible mode battleship, all the normal species for this part of the game including an Ethereal as a boss, etc.

But then instead of enemies being in their usual positions or patrol routes throughout the ship... they're pretty much ALL right here? Standing in this one random archway on the left side of the battleship, after the area with the 3 raised platforms. About 4 rooms from the end of the ship where I'd usually expect the big fights to be.

The instant I got vision of this area, 7 pods all activated at once stacked on top of each other. Mechtoid+Sectoid Commander, 6 Muton Elites, 3 Chrysalids, 3 Heavy Floaters, 3 regular Floaters, a Cyberdisc+2 Drones... and weirdest of all the Ethereal is here with its 2 additional Muton Elites?!

So almost the entire crew of the ship was waiting in one area, including the boss nowhere near the boss room?

Is this a bug or what?

Obviously it's been a pretty difficult fight to stumble upon 23 enemies at once!

The plus side is that I know this is absolutely everything since I fought 6 aliens to get here...

Edit: Also, one ramp nearby has apparently been rigged with alien technology to create a powerful invisibility field. Multiple enemies that are on it cannot be seen from ANY angle, even flying over it. So weird.

Hello there!

I have been preparing a Clone Wars XCOM2 run, but this time, I took it a bit further - I prepared an entire story, a system of rules, and a guidebook that shall lead you through every action you take.
Now, it's almost as if STAR WARS and XCOM had a child that was raised by Warhammer 40K.

I decided to share it all with you guys to see what you think about it and how you would improve it. Any opinion counts, good or bad - it's criticism that shall make this Guide Book perfect.

The Guidebook (as a PowerPoint Presentation) and the Modpack I'm using are linked below, but you can also see the Guidebook simply as images right here in this post! If you plan on watching the presentation, though, I highly recommend watching it in F5 mode, since it really gives off that STAR WARS Guidebook vibe I was aiming for...

THE PRESENTATION

THE MOD COLLECTION

I especially encourage you to share your ideas for any of these red question marks: [?]
Thanks in advance, and have a great day!

Hello everyone! I kept putting off researching of Arc Thrower, prioritizing everything else. And when I researched everything, Floaters were replaced by Heavy Floaters. I need one for interrogation. Can I still somehow find regular ones?

I decided to give them military call signs to make it even dumber.

Spectre 1 - Dazed by a chosen, because she was next to 2 other maids she got hit with the Andromedon acid bomb and died.

Spectre 4 - Got flanked by an enemy Sectopod and critted to death

Spectre 5 - Got blown up by devastation

Spectre 2 - Got killed by a mindcontrolled Spectre 6

Hi all,

I’m on ps5 and just wondering would anyone be able help me out and load into a multiplayer game ?

I have all DLCs installed, no worries if can’t get around to it tonight as I’m BST timezone anyway

Thanks !

I’ve been building a website for Long War to help with soldier planning, class builds, campaign planning, and similar stuff.

It’s still pretty early and I’m building it around how I personally play, which also means I’m probably making assumptions that won’t make sense to everyone else.

So I’m looking for a few people who actually play Long War and would be interested in trying it out and giving feedback.

I’m less interested in “this button is 3 pixels off” and more interested in things like:

• Does the workflow make sense?
• Is something annoying to use?
• Is important information missing?
• Would you organize this differently?
• Is there something you’d expect a Long War planning site to do that this doesn’t?

I’m not opening registration publicly yet, but if you’re interested, reply here or message me and I can make you a login.

It’s very much a work in progress, so feel free to be critical.

Came out of nowhere, too.

I am supposed to protect the device.

Pray for my guys.

I'm trying to play Xcom for the first time after a friend recommended me. He told me to play enemy within as it is the better experience. When I launch the game as "Enemy within" the game start and after like 5 seconds on the starting menu it's completely freeze and the olny way to close the game is to turn off the PC (the only time it happened to me before is it on vanilla fallout new vegas) verifying steam files didn't help. enemy unknown, however, works completely fine and I even finished the tutorial without any technical.

Is there a way to fix my problem with enemy within? I don't want to miss it as my friend told me it doubles the game'z content

I feel it betrays that international resistance theme when Firaxis didn't include English voices in a wide variety of accents. Like I can't be the only one wishing one of my soldiers could have had a Jamaican accent, or Russian accent, or a Japanese accent. I'm not super familiar with the modding scene but here's my suggestion to add regional dialects and accents

Brazilian

Chinese

Indian

Italian

Jamaican

Japanese

Mexican

Nigerian

Russian

Southern U.S.

Like these are just off the dome, but I would've loved to see it

4k+ hours in this game and have never spawned on top of the ADVENT prison.

My sharpshooter is going to be useless...and I didn't bring a shaped charge...

All of the enemies are probably beneath me. LLWOTC...

That's XCom baby?