Long War Rebalance

Long War Rebalance is a mod of Long War (Itself a mod of XCOM: Enemy Within, of course) that I'd theoretically like to do a complete analysis series on, but my approach only really works well when a game is in more or less a static state, and Long War Rebalance rarely goes even a full month without being updated. And not just bugfixes or minor balance tweaks like 'slightly increase the Aim bonus from this Item' (Though there's plenty of that happening, too), but fairly regularly doing what I'll call conceptually significant changes like reordering parts of a class skill tree, changing fundamentally what an Item does, giving existing enemies whole new Abilities... not even getting into some of the more obviously major changes the game has made.

Even so, it's sufficiently huge an improvement over Long War 1.0 (Which, for all its faults, I did meaningfully feel was an improvement over the base game) that I feel it merits some kind of coverage on this site.

So here we are.

As the mod is very regularly updated and I'm not going to try to update this post, don't be surprised if some of what I say here doesn't really apply if you give the mod a try yourself. I'm going to try to focus on what seem to me to be the most stable major elements of interest, but it's not like I know what the developers (Or other players providing feedback) feel are the central elements of interest. So keep that in mind.

Also, I'm going to be shortening Long War Rebalance to LWR and Long War 1.0 to LW1 from here on, for reference.

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So first of all, LWR puts a lot more emphasis on accessibility and comprehensibility than LW1 ever did. It color-codes action icons to help the player keep track of various states like 'will use an action point without ending the turn', or 'won't spend an action at all if its condition is met', which is a huge improvement: one of the problems with LW1 is that it has a lot of modifier effects that change action point usage and whatnot, and then the player just has to keep track of this stuff in their head or constantly double-check the increasingly large pile of icons in the lower-left to keep it all straight, all while juggling multiple squads while being expected to have different soldiers of the same class potentially built very differently. Thus, in LW1, playing to a high level of skill on a consistent basis involves heavy cognitive load, not because the gameplay is at the level of depth and complexity that inherently produces such cognitive load but just because the UI isn't built for its conditions.

LWR isn't perfect at this end (For one thing, I don't think it has an in-game way to readily remind yourself of what the colors mean), but this drastically improves the game on numerous levels, making it less essential to play the game regularly in large blocks if you want to keep everything straight, and making it less likely the player will have things go wrong because they forgot this Assault isn't built the way their other Assaults are. It probably has other benefits I'm not readily thinking of, honestly.

That's just color-coding for ability usage per se, mind. LWR also color-codes your soldiers' Action Point bars to communicate several possible pieces of information, such as which soldiers are Officers, who all is psionic, and a few other things -most notably, the Action Point bar turns orange if the soldier is at risk of being hit by Overwatch! This is a constant problem with the Firaxis XCOMs and mod derivatives like LW1, where it's easy to not realize a given soldier is in fact in danger of being shot by Overwatch even though technically all the information involved is 'in the open', and it's a huge improvement to the game to have a consistent indicator of this point.

Of course, Overwatch itself has been massively overhauled by LWR, and thank goodness. I've talked before about how the base game's model of Overwatch, though understandable as an attempt to recapture the Overwatch mechanics in classic X-COM in this new engine, end up largely being a way to get the jump on inactive pods, where this encourages the player inching forward and ending every turn in Overwatch if they can to ambush the enemy -which is incredibly unfun and all kinds of problematic from a design standpoint, and unfortunately LW1 embraced this awful dynamic as a key feature of playing well.

By contrast, LWR gets rid of it.

More precisely, where in the base game and LW1 Overwatch is a shot that can occur in the enemy turn but is otherwise just a bad regular shot, in LWR entering Overwatch marks all currently-visible targets to try to take a shot on them if they do something that triggers Overwatch (Though a given soldier can only fire from Overwatch once by default), and trades away the ability to land a critical hit in exchange for ignoring 50% of the target's Cover benefits when it happens. In other words, there is no Overwatch-crawling (You literally can't activate Overwatch if there's no enemies in sight of the soldier, and even if you could the new mechanics mean it wouldn't do anything), and instead Overwatch shots are more reliable and potentially more lethal. (In spite of not being able to crit, because Cover provides fairly significant damage reduction in LWR)

This is a huge improvement, freeing the player to get to actual gameplay instead of spending 5 minutes constantly Overwatch-crawling until something to interact with actually shows up. It's also a huge improvement on the level of making Overwatch a more legitimate tool in the player's arsenal, something you break out when an enemy is in Full Cover and you can't get a flank and can't smash their Cover and can't use something that bypasses Cover. This also has the effect of making enemies being in Full Cover much less prone to producing frustrating no-good-answers moments, which was a serious problem in both the base game and LW1.

Also crucial is the flipside effect on enemy Overwatch, in that one of the most frustrating you-cannot-be-serious aspects of LW1's mid-to-late-game is that it was perfectly happy to set up no-win nonsense where you'd have a Heavy Floater enter sight, go into Overwatch as a completely free action, have Sentry so it shot twice, have Opportunist so these shots were fully accurate and very likely to crit, and have Covering Fire so these shots were made in response to basically anything any of your soldiers did and happened before your soldiers took their actions. A pod of Heavy Floaters doing this nonsense was basically an unfightable death roulette; if you tried to use Lightning Reflexes to pull the shots, that soldier was all but guaranteed to die, and Lightning Reflexes was basically the only answer that could be used to do anything helpful if your entire squad was already in sight; the only good answers to this stuff were centered on being lucky enough to have some soldiers out of sight but able to act usefully from out of sight, such as Squadsight soldiers, or a Rocketeer hopefully managing to land a Rocket on the pod.

(I'm sure there's LW1 veterans who have worked out how to fight through this stuff mostly-reliably and feel it's perfectly fine. I don't care; such a concerted effort to take away all vaguely reasonable answers is just awful, and there are inarguably numerous realistic situations where the player can do nothing to properly prepare for this nonsense)

Whereas LWR making it so only currently-visible units are marked by Overwatch lets the player have ready access to realistic options like sending in one of the soldiers who happened to not be in line of sight of that specific enemy. (It's surprisingly rare for the entire squad to be visible to any one enemy) And then on top of that LWR just adds a lot more ability to work around Overwatch -actions that don't trigger it, ways to clear Overwatch currently on a soldier, making it so that clearing Overwatch is a more generally accessible tool (Not quite XCOM 2's 'Overwatch on enemies is useless because any damage clears it', but having all grenades able to clear Overwatch is a far sight better than LW1's situation of almost nothing being able to actually clear Overwatch), and being far less aggressive about giving your enemies absurdly powerful Overwatch access in the first place.

This also connects to one of the other big improvements/context changes LWR makes: SHIVs are assumed.

I've already talked at length about about how SHIVs in the base game are confused as to how they contribute and Enemy Within tries to mildly prop them up simultaneous to introducing Mecs, which of course basically completely invalidate SHIVs. What I haven't talked about is that LW1 is a pretty marginal improvement to this dire situation: LW1 makes a bunch of changes to SHIVs, many of which make them more interesting to engage with and several of which can be called straight improvements, but it also makes a bunch of other changes that are trade-offs or, frankly, straight nerfs, all while having supercharged the human classes (Including the Mecs...), with the final result being that SHIVs hold up better than in the base game for a portion of the early game but ultimately still fall off hard, only retaining any real possibility of relevance from the fact that they ignore LW1's Fatigue system and so can be used to round out teams doing relatively safe missions when the (superior) human soldiers are in limited supply.

LWR takes the basic skeleton of the LW1 model (An actual equipment screen for SHIVs, for example), but fixes a bunch of the problems and gives them a clearer role that doesn't have such a strong risk of being sidelined by Mecs, among other points making the Alloy SHIV 'acts as Partial Cover' thing standard to all SHIVs. Crucially, it makes it so SHIVs are no longer effectively eating experience: at the end of a mission, all experience credited to a SHIV gets split among its human teammates. All by itself this is a massive improvement, doing away with an essentially invisible disadvantage of SHIVs shared by the base game and LW1 where using them at all is cutting into your ability to grow your soldiers. In exchange, the only 'nerf' SHIVs have suffered is that they have a mechanic that functionally boils down to a hard cap of 1 SHIV per mission. (You can bring multiple SHIVs, but only one can act each turn, making it a terrible idea)

This (successful!) design assumption that you're using a SHIV -signaled well by the first mission of a run now having a SHIV running with the initial batch of Rookies- has a bunch of positive impacts on the design. Wrapping back to the Overwatch point for a second, if you do end up with your entire squad marked by Overwatch, then if nothing else you should have a SHIV able to act and trigger Overwatch; LWR SHIVs are very tough...

... between absurdly high base HP and high inherent Damage Reduction. This is a basic SHIV with no upgrades or relevant gear, and you can see it has 24 HP (Four rows of 5 HP, plus a fifth row of 4 HP) and just shaved off 4 points of damage from an attack to reduce it to 1 damage. By contrast, LW1 basic SHIVs have 10 HP and shave off 1.5 damage from a given attack, which is better durability than LW1 human soldiers have, but not by much.

Furthermore, in LWR Overwatch's primary benefit is partially bypassing Cover bonuses, which SHIVs of course don't make use of, so having a SHIV absorb the shot means the enemy would've been better off just taking a regular shot. So having a SHIV absorb Overwatch fire, though less good of a solution than avoiding triggering Overwatch fire in the first place, is still a good choice overall and crucially is one the player is genuinely expected to have available by default.

This screenshot also wraps us back to the accessibility point, in that you can see an 'Ammo Spent' popup -that's because the Floater that just shot the SHIV ran out of ammo. It was always hugely frustrating in LW1 that it was realistic for enemies to run out of ammo but basically impossible to keep track of each enemy's ammo well enough to act on such opportunities; LWR not only having the above popup but in fact letting you see the 'out of ammo' state in the F1 screen is a tremendous improvement to the experience. Indeed, you can check an enemy's current ammo in general with the F1 screen -and you can also see in this screenshot that player ammo is more clearly marked, in that there's now a red bar above each weapon that is clearly divided into individual segments, so you can see that this Rookie's Assault Rifle has a maximum of 3 shots, 2 of which are currently unavailable.

LWR also improves the mission preview functionality by giving you a screenshot of the 'area of operations' that's being used when you enter the mission prep screen. LW1 already provided the text summary in the upper-left corner of the screen, but it's only at all helpful if you specifically consult UFOpaedia's map table list, and even if you do that the categorizations are of limited aid. For example, getting a 'Roadway' AO on an Abduction tends to mean maps like Street Hurricane that are basically a long and fairly clear corridor Snipers do particularly well in while Assaults struggle to do their jobs without dying or pulling a lot of pods, but it also includes Street Overpass EWI, which is basically the opposite; a map Assaults tend to do well on, but which Snipers struggle to find safe positions with clear firing lines that are actually relevant to the action. LWR providing a map's loading screen screenshot is much clearer, where once you're familiar with all the maps you'll usually know on sight exactly which map you're looking at and thus be able to make informed decisions about what kinds of soldiers to bring and how to kit them out.

(And if you're playing LWR, you probably are sufficiently familiar with the base game to have the maps memorized)

By a similar token, when considering assaulting a UFO, the game gives 'confirmed sightings', which gives the player a partial idea of what they're going to be encountering even before they have the Hyperwave Decoder. (Not to mention informing you of roughly how many enemies you'll be fighting, and telling you what alien level the ship is at, which is huge) This is a really big deal; a big part of LW1's broken strategic design came down to it wanting the player to basically 'counter-pick' enemy compositions and be willing to just skip some missions as too nasty to fight, but then LW1 kept the information needed to make such decisions either not available until fairly far into a run or simply unavailable entirely. (Exactly how many Alien Leaders of what types are on this mission? LW1 forces you to go in blind to this info, while having made it highly impactful) LWR adding sightings -but making them unreliable at covering all enemy types- means the player actually gets to plan for a given composition from the very beginning of the game, while still needing to account for the possibility the sightings missed something. (ie a hyper-specialized composition based solely on sighting info is asking for trouble)

Also noteworthy -and especially important given how in flux the mod is in due to its constant development- is that the Gray Market consistently...

... gives you a summary of what all a given thing is actually used in. No more sitting on 60 Sectoid bodies in the midgame because you don't know off the top of your head whether there's a later Foundry Project that requires a bunch of Sectoid bodies or the like, unaware that you really should be selling them pretty aggressively because you've done every major project that requires Sectoid corpses.

It's not perfect, as for one thing some of these summaries are so long they don't fit into the screen all at once, forcing you to wait for them to slooooowly scroll down to see the full list, and for another you have to manually collate info like 'I've done all the Foundry Projects that use Sectoid bodies', but it's a huge improvement over LW1, where a sizable part of the game's (steep) strategic learning curve was centered on memorizing (Or constantly looking up) what all was needed for what so you'd know when you could start getting aggressive about selling corpses and so on. The ideal scenario would be that the game would automatically remove or strikethrough or turn red or something stuff you've already done as you did it, but it's pretty clear LWR is often kludging together answers where the engine isn't really meant to support a better answer, so this clunkiness is very understandable.

Returning to the tactical combat, LWR also massively overhauls pod activation mechanics. Firstly, when a pod is first activated, 'chain activations' can occur, where any other pods in the darkness that have line of sight to the activating pod will also activate. Secondly, at the end of Alien Activity any inactive pods that can see active pod members also activate.

On the face of it, this sounds kind of horrible, in that you can walk forward a little bit and suddenly twelve enemies are active, which is always a miserable experience to have happen in LW1. In actuality, this is a good thing (In conjunction with several other changes I'll talk about in a minute), in that it combines with the Overwatch overhaul to remove basically everything miserable and unfun about pod activation from the base game. You no longer inch forward desperately trying to pull exactly 1 pod at a time and hoping they'll walk into your continuously-recreated Overwatch line instead of being activated in your turn.

This is a particularly big contrast to LW1, which embraced and exaggerated the problems with the pod activation system, in part through systemic changes that at first glance don't necessarily have anything to do with the pod system itself. For example, LW1 increasing player squad size was a key part of the problem; LW1 set itself up so it basically has to assume the player always has their entire squad ready to fall upon a newly-activated pod with all their power if it wants to regularly make pods actually threatening, and LW1 thus makes pods larger and in particular makes one-per-pod type enemies much tougher and stronger, because it basically has to assume that a Mechtoid is going to be shot by 8 soldiers before it gets a chance to act. This is in turn made worse by the high 'power ceiling' on the player's soldiers; among other points, one of LW1's sensible-at-first-glance rules of thumb is that basically every class gets access to some way to fire twice in a turn over the course of leveling, which has the benefit of reducing the risk of serious class unevenness, but has the side effect of meaning LW1 has to start assuming that the player will effectively fall upon a newly-activated pod with the might of 16 soldiers. All of which in turn means the consequences for failing to perfectly manage pod activation are much more dire, because if a pod is designed so 16 attacking actions will rough it up but leave it viably a threat, then pulling such a pod when you've got maybe 4 such actions available is basically a guarantee you're going to start losing soldiers -which then is liable to turn into a death spiral, where even if you pull through, losing 3 soldiers means it's now completely impossible for you to bring to bear the firepower LW1's pods are designed to potentially survive to be merely a reasonable threat, and so later pods are themselves far more likely to kill more people even if you manage to be perfect at pod activation from then on forth.

In conjunction with the base engine's issues with drawing line of sight in an intuitive and sensible way, the maps often not really being designed so five pods of eight enemies apiece can be fought as five separate encounters, and all the other things making it impossible to even mostly-reliably approach a perfect success rate on pod activation management, LW1 ends up with a heavy death roulette quality where you're going to intermittently have things go horribly wrong due to minor things that honestly shouldn't constitute a mistake in the first place, let alone a mistake that merits such dire consequences. It also worsens the base game's problems with class design, where the Assault is inherently a risky class purely because having them do their thing can pull more pods, where Snipers picking off enemies has no such risk.

Whereas LWR can (and does) design itself around the expectation that a given pod doesn't necessarily need to be able to weather significant firepower in a turn to be a real threat -even if the player is savescumming to always arrange to get the jump on pods whenever possible, there will regularly be moments where they squash one pod effortlessly but two other more distant pods also activated and so they can't just repeat this feat on those pods. And as for the worst-case scenarios of pulling a lot of pods at once, LWR takes steps to limit the problems there, in that chain-activating pods can result in later pods in the chain being 'off guard' (Which causes them to not get a free pod activation move action), or even being so unprepared they additionally have no ammo in their primary weapon, forcing them to spend a turn reloading before they can start attacking. So when 4+ pods activate at once the player generally gets some breathing room to handle the enemies in a more staggered way anyway, exactly as the pod activation system is intended to do.

On top of all that, LWR makes decent use of a semi-popular modding solution to the problem of activating pods when most of your squad has finished its turn, where your soldiers can get their own Free Pod Activation Move if they're out of action points. (And not already committed to Overwatch or Suppression or the like) So even pulling pods in the worst way possible, the player isn't stuck watching their suddenly-flanked troops get massacred by a pod that woke up because it got seen by their last soldier moving and happening to finagle line of sight on the pod for 1 tile in their travel; the player will generally at least be able to reposition for better defensive positions, or even fall back out of sight to ensure some enemies can't make an attack at all because they have to spend both action points on getting back into sight. (I'm personally not a fan of this solution, as it has a lot of problematic clunkiness, but it's also the least important of these changes, so I don't feel the clunkiness is a lethal problem)

All of this in turn means that aggressive play is much more rewarded; the overwhelming majority of the time, having an Assault charge into a pod's face is safe from a pod activation standpoint, because generally the enemy pod has already activated any other nearby pods, where it takes finicky edge cases with janky line of sight for your soldier to get sight on an inactive pod in the process of approaching an active pod. Missions that in LW1 end up being 45 minutes of Overwatch crawling and 15 minutes of actual combat turn into more like 20 minutes, almost all of which is actually engaging with the interesting content.

(All that said, the base game's innate problems still shine through at times: chain activation is based on drawing line of sight from where the pod members activate at, not from where they move to. In the small landed and crashed UFO maps this distinction is generally actually beneficial since it means charging a soldier even a little past where the pod members end up at to flank them probably doesn't activate anything even if a pod was just beyond line of sight of the pod you're fighting when it activated, but in larger UFOs and especially in urban maps, it's entirely possible to have a pod activate, a member scramble to a position that has line of sight on another pod through a door or window or some such, and the player discovers this by virtue of going to flank this one enemy and unexpectedly activating a pod in exactly the way this chain activation system is meant to avoid happening. Playing LWR has in fact made me appreciate all the more XCOM 2's vastly improved map design, as so much of Enemy Unknown/Within's jank is tied up in their maps having serious gameplay problems you can't really fix without, y'know, changing the maps themselves)

This improved pacing extends to the strategic layer, too. One of the biggest reasons I burned out on LW1 is, as I've covered in talking about War of the Chosen's Fatigue system, that its true length is really something like triple its meaningful length. I never beat LW1, partly because once I was solidly into the midgame it was increasingly defined by broken, unfun design, but also because it increasingly had that feel of 'I've already done exactly this like six times, the game is just wasting my time at this point', where I couldn't muster enthusiasm to keep going; why keep playing if it's going to be not only excruciating, but boring? Where LW1 then has two different Second Wave settings for making it even longer and only one to make it less drawn-out, LWR instead has shifted the baseline tuning to be more like LW1's 'Not So Long War' setting (The one that roughly halved campaign length), and switched the Second Wave settings around, where you can further reduce the campaign length with a couple of Second Wave settings and only have the one toggle for increasing it back to more like LW1's baseline.

Also noteworthy is how LWR overhauls alien progression/pacing: one of the problems with LW1 is it applies its 'more, more, more!' mentality to too many factors on Alien danger. You start out with high-but-not-unreasonable pod counts, slightly increased sizes of individual pods, and most enemies having gained at least one distinctive ability that makes them more interesting to fight, which is all good!... but then the pod counts keep going up, the pod sizes eventually grow to a monstrous 8 members (Except EXALT missions can have an even larger pod on them!), individual enemy stats go up and up, and LW1 keeps cramming in the next sets of Alien threats only somewhat slower than the base game does. Maps become overpopulated messes where you can encounter basically anything in enormous numbers with enormous stats, and the gameplay becomes... very bad.

LWR spreads things out much more: enemy stats don't grow as aggressively, pod sizes don't grow as fast, pod counts are actually pretty stable, and enemies don't gain so many abilities from the Alien Level going up. Indeed, this is part of why chain-activation isn't so bad; even quite late in a run, you might have only 4 pods of at most 5 enemies apiece in a mission, where activating literally the entire map is maybe 20 Aliens. In LW1, long before you were ready for endgame you could already be seeing a map have 5+ pods of 8 Aliens apiece, all getting crammed into maps far too small to space them out, resulting in nonsense where you open a door or turn a corner and activate 24 Aliens and still have to worry that further movement might activate even more pods!

But even aside the consideration of pod activation, LWR also adds more gravitas to later Alien types through this wider spacing; in LW1, there's a noticeable extent to which later enemies blur together with earlier enemies because everything gets increasingly monstrous stats and most of them randomly show up in all mission types quite quickly. Encountering Muton Elites doesn't feel like you're fighting a particularly serious endgame threat, because not long after they first show up they're just omnipresently normal and not even that much more dangerous than the Thin Men or Sectoids they're showing up alongside. LWR has elites feel elite, because they're uncommon in general, and in turn gets to actually be more extreme with the threat profile of some of them than LW1 is because LWR doesn't have to balance around them showing up in basically every mission. (Sectoid Commanders are actually really intimidating in LWR, where in LW1 they're... not)

Returning to more the tactical layer, another thing that might sound bad at first glance but which is a pretty big improvement is that Mec classes have been collapsed from 8 distinct classes to 4. This is good; LW1 did 8 Mec classes as building on the logics of 'make Mecs derived from base classes' and 'LW1 split up the base game's confused classes into their conceptual component parts', but LW1 clearly struggled to actually come up with 8 distinct Mec classes. In practice the 8 Mec classes had a lot of overlap, where they simply didn't have the kind of variety 8 base classes suggests; LWR collapsing them into 4 classes gets them more reliably distinct from each other.

By a similar token, LWR's approach to base class skill handling reduces apparent variety (No longer does every class have 3 skills at every single rank), but improves real variety: LW1's base classes had an annoying habit of 'bleeding' into each other, where it was possible to build two soldiers of different classes as being very similar to each other. (Two Overwatch-focused builds on different classes could be very nearly identical, for example) This wasn't as egregious as the Mec overlap point, but it was a problem; LWR still has some capacity to overlap classes, but not nearly so strongly, helping them stand out from each other more.

Also notable is that LWR improves capture mechanics, in that one of the problems with the base game that LW1 hugely exaggerates is that as player firepower rises it becomes increasingly difficult to knock enemies into the relatively narrow HP range captures work in, instead of straight-up killing them. LWR adds as a standard capability to all Pistols the 'Maim' ability, which fires 2 shots that do exactly 1 damage each (No matter how powerful the given Pistol is), and if one of those shots should kill the target it instead becomes 'Maimed', ie it becomes disabled immediately and skips its next turn, allowing the player to approach for a capture more safely. Also notable is that a stun attempt that fails its roll also inflicts this Maimed status; no more setting up a perfect capture opportunity and then having a 10% chance for it to do literally nothing. Even if it doesn't actually capture the target, they'll still be made irrelevant for a turn, guaranteed. This whole thing isn't perfect and I'm personally not a fan of your stun tool having switched from an Item slot to replacing the primary gun and eating an Item slot to boot (There's a lot of weird jank that results from this change), but it's still a very admirable and reasonably effective attempt to smooth out yet another thing LW1 had very problematically-designed.

Even better, LWR finally does away with the 'zoo' phenomenon, where the player is incentivized to capture a lot of Aliens and ends up with a zillion live captives in storage. I've seen people describe LW1 as doing away with this, which has always baffled me because LW1 makes it so much worse because you need so many captured Aliens to cover all your equipment needs, between the increased squad size and increased variety of possible Plasma weapons to build and making all Plasma weapons require an intact Alien weapon to manufacture, not to mention that you now want multiple Outsider Shards because you want multiple Skeleton Keys. In LWR, though, captured alien weapons have literally no use except to be sold; you do get a little more cash if you capture enemies regularly, between the weapons themselves and live Aliens selling better at the Gray Market than corpses, but it's a pretty small difference; if you want to capture exactly 1 copy of each non-Outsider, that's all you'll need. Outsiders are the only Alien you'll want to capture a lot of copies of, and for one thing that means you can eventually only bother to bring capture capability into UFO missions; Outsiders don't show up in Abductions, Terror missions, or (regular) Council missions.

Also notable is that LWR makes serious efforts to make Suppression not only usably good, but specifically actually suppress targets; LW1 makes Suppression pretty powerful and worth using, but by virtue of making it a way to outright kill targets in Full Cover, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what a representation of suppressive fire should be doing. In LWR Suppression instead has two possible effects: against a target in Cover, the target becomes Pinned Down, which eats an Action Point, in addition to the Suppression effects from the base game and LW1. (ie reducing the target's Aim, reducing max range on things like Grenades, and giving an opportunity to fire on the target if it does much of anything) Notably, the Pinned Down state eating an action point is not refunded if the Suppression is interrupted during the target's team's turn. Altogether this means there's no more of this nonsense where a sufficiently durable unit can just walk through the wall of bullets and effectively ignore Suppression's effects, because if a Suppressed Muton Elite does decide to walk to a new position that means they're giving up the ability to attack or otherwise act; this in turn also raises the relevancy of the Aim penalty and assorted max range reductions, because unless an ally clears the Suppression the Pinned Down unit is stuck taking their offensive action inside the Suppressed state.

The alternate effect of Suppression is that against targets not in Cover (Such as because they can't use Cover), instead of becoming Pinned Down they automatically and unavoidably take some damage at the start of their team's turn. This thus means Suppression does something against eg melee Aliens, and notably this includes flying enemies -meaning Suppression is a built-in tool for working around the unflankable high Defense of flying enemies. (Which I've commented before on how toxic flying enemy Defense bonuses were in both the base game and LW1 due to the utter lack of counterplay, so this is really appreciated) In addition to being design-sensible, it's also sensible as a realistic representation of suppressive fire; of course the enemies not moving from one piece of cover to another are going to get hit by sprays of bullets more reliably than the ones that are!

And there's tons of 'little' things I really appreciate that aren't so broadly significant but still matter. For example, in LW1 the Gunner class has the SAW and the LMG weapon classes; the SAW is basically just a better Rifle, and then the LMG is to the SAW as Sniper Rifles are to regular Rifles, which is to say the LMG gets extended range but can't be fired unless at 2 action points. This is a sound dynamic in theory (It works okay for Rifles vs Sniper Rifles), but the LMG only gets 'limited Squadsight', meaning it can only barely fire past line of sight (20% farther, specifically), which in practice means you rarely have any enemies in this narrow band outside a SAW's range but inside an LMG's range... and the SAW-equipped Gunner could just walk forward to be in range. So the LMG's only theoretical use was to Suppress Overwatched Covering Fire enemies from beyond their range, which required everything lined up perfectly so the LMG user wasn't in normal range, wasn't too far for their tiny band of limited Squadsight to reach, and also actually had a clear line of fire on this Overwatched target. In practice, LMGs in LW1 were a trap choice that only served to screw over players who hadn't yet figured out they should never use or build LMGs.

In LWR, this entire dynamic is scrapped; now LMGs have an Aim penalty and a greater Mobility penalty (By the way: they already had a greater Mobility penalty than SAWs in LW1, which was another problem with them), and in exchange provide the Danger Zone effect, which is to say area of effect Suppression. And this is the only way for Gunners to get Danger Zone in LWR, so if you want AoE Suppression you want LMGs. And for one thing with Suppression now actually being useful against melee Aliens, the fact that melee Aliens are prone to clustering on initial activation makes them a great target for LMG-backed Suppression! So where LMGs were a trap choice in LW1, in LWR they're useful and with some clear niches to justify bringing them in particular; going on a Terror mission? An LMG may well be better than a SAW.

This is the example that most stood out to me, but there's lots of this; LW1 is filled to the gills with stuff that sounds like it might be useful but really isn't once you understand how it fits into the game, or which has exactly one extremely narrow niche, and LWR is pretty reliable about overhauling things so they have more meaningful niches at all and also these niches are easier to identify as existing, as well as easier to figure out whether a given situation is going to be a good fit to them. (That is, in LW1 even if the LMG niche of 'Suppress Covering Fire Overwatchers' was a real niche, LW1 isn't willing to give you the information necessary to meaningfully guess whether this mission is a case that capability would be useful in. Whereas in LWR you can actually go 'hmmm, this seems like a good time to swap my SAW for an LMG')

There's so much junk added by LW1 that as of this writing LWR still has a fair amount of 'what actual situation would I appreciate this in?', as LWR is reluctant to just remove LW1 content, but still. It's a huge improvement, and with the constant development LWR may someday get everything to have a real place.

Also pleasantly surprising is LWR has a number of elements it adds or makes much more significant than in LW1/the base game, and tends to actually handle in a pretty nice way, with its main flaw in this regard tending to be that it's a bit poor at communicating itself. For example, a concept LWR puts in is 'randomly free end-in-idle chances' -that assorted effects give a unit a chance of not spending action points and not ending its turn when performing an action that isn't pure movement and doesn't commit the unit. (ie these effects can't trigger on Overwatch, Suppression, and so on) Normally, I'm not terribly fond of this kind of RNG being added into a game; I was honestly expecting to give up on LWR pretty quickly in part due to this kind of thing when I was first giving it a try.

But the reason I'm not fond of this kind of randomness isn't the randomness per se, but rather is myriad layers to how such topics are normally approached by games. Usually games use, essentially, casinos as their model for how randomness should work -y'know, the places that make their money by having the majority of customers lose the majority of the time? Unsurprisingly, this usually results in RNG elements in games being hugely undesirable for the player to ever touch; if you can perform a regular attack for free, or spend 20 Mana (Or whatever) to have a 50% chance of doing double damage and a 50% chance of doing no damage, the latter is the same average damage but now it's unreliable and charging you a limited resource for the privilege. This exact type of dynamic is depressingly normal in games, and often the math is even more obviously unfavorable -I've seen plenty of games that inexplicably think the player will want to have a 50% chance to miss in exchange for a 50% increase in damage if they hit, even though that's a reduction in average damage!

Whereas in LWR... well, first of all, the end-in-idle free action effects are largely incidental bonuses. If a soldier acts while visible to an Officer, they have a chance of the action being free; as LWR has redesigned Officers to be pure improvement (In LW1, being an Officer inexplicably increased a soldier's Fatigue load), there's really no reason to not promote people to Officers and bring them regularly, and 'in sight of the Officer' is a generous trigger condition. Several abilities -such as Extra Conditioning- provide a package of benefits that includes a chance to get actions being randomly free, where you're not picking Extra Conditioning purely to gamble on its free actions effect but rather are getting it as a bit of a bonus on top of the primary reasons to take it.

Second, LWR has the unusual quality of having its underlying rule resolutions be what I'm going to call 'player-friendly'. To give a concrete example: in LWR, Assaults have as their foundational ability Close Encounters, which has as its primary benefit that if the soldier fires a shot from close-in, once per turn this sets them to 1 action point but with reduced Mobility. If your Assault with Extra Conditioning gets point-blank with a target and fires, there is a chance for Extra Conditioning to kick in -and this will overrule Close Encounters. Which is to say the Assault can then still trigger Close Encounters, doesn't suffer the Mobility penalty, and doesn't have their Action Points set to 1 if they had 2 beforehand.

This is a notable contrast to what I'm used to seeing when games have the potential for exactly this kind of ability interaction: most games willing to use this type of RNG in the first place would've had an Extra Conditioning trigger be overruled by Close Encounters, wasting the Extra Conditioning trigger. More generally, games with this kind of RNG effect tend to endeavor to set it up so the player getting lucky is only beneficial if they took actions that only make sense if the lucky event happens. Whereas in LWR, when these end-in-idle free action triggers occur, the player can usually capitalize on them readily even if they've been playing as if these mechanics don't exist; there's only a few 'encourages gambling' edges to the system. (It is, for example, better to fire one's last shot, have the action be free, then reload, than it is to reload, have it be free, and then fire, creating cases where it's tempting to fire the last shot and hope it's free) It's all a really nice pleasant surprise!

This isn't even getting into literally hundreds of quality of life features LWR has added, such as how the game lets you know when it's time to sweep for EXALT before they hack you. Which, to be clear, it's always been possible to reliably prevent all but the first hack in both base Enemy Within and LW1; you just needed to either regularly save and then load if a hack hit or actually know what the highly-predictable schedule was and keep track of dates and all, and either way a player could 100%-reliably avoid being hacked outside the first time. LWR telling you 'hey, you should pay 200$ to sweep for EXALT right now' is just stripping out a lot of the opacity and tedium from a player making it happen on their own.

So yeah. LWR is a great mod. If you liked the idea of LW1 but (Very understandably) hated actually playing through it, consider giving LWR a try. And even if you didn't try LW1, maybe give it a try anyway if for example you enjoyed the base game and XCOM 2 but found pod activation really frustrating -LWR really does an impressive job of making pod activation management not only not a central skill but in fact rarely a thing to keep in mind at all.

Oh, and as the mod has gone on it's gotten more impressive and ambitious in its changes, such as making EXALT get SHIVs of their own, or very recently as of this post making it so enemies have variable skins so you can identify on sight which Thin Man is the Leader! (Among other things nice about this addition) So even if 'LW1 but better' or 'Firaxis XCOM but without pod activation being so important' don't sound like reasons to give it a try, there's content! Cool content!

Again: I'd love to do an actual series on LWR, but it simply updates way too aggressively. So at least for now, you get this standalone post.