Mod of the week: The Long War for XCOM

MOD OF THE WEEK
In Mod of the Week, Chris LIvingston scours the world of user-created adventure for worthy downloads.

In Mod of the Week, Chris LIvingston scours the world of user-created adventure for worthy downloads. This week, the mod that makes the outstanding XCOM bigger and tougher.

"More, more, more," says the disco song, then asks: "How do you like it? How do you like it?" When it comes to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the Long War moddefinitely adds more: more weapons, more tech, more options, more challenges, more campaign missions, and even more squad members. How do you like that?

Released last year, Long War was updated this month and its 14th beta adds some new fixes and features to a mod already bursting with new stuff. First and foremost, the mod invites you to struggle through a longer, harsher campaign, but provides you with some new options to endure the prolonged alien assault. Your squads start out with six slots, and it can be increased to eight through Officer Training School, and certain missions allow squads of ten or even twelve members.

Mo' soldiers, mo' problems. While it's great to have extra hands on board, Long War introduces the idea of battle fatigue, meaning soldiers returning from combat missions will need a few days of rest to cope with all the turn-based scuttling, shooting, and shrieking in fear they've endured. You can send fatigued soldiers out on a fresh mission, but that will lead to an even longer (and mandatory) fatigue period when (if) they return. This means you'll need to establish a much bigger pool of soldiers and rotate them in and out of squads, adding a little extra strategy during mission planning. SHIV units don't incur fatigue, proving once again that robots are our betters, though they do require a lengthy repair time if they're damaged on a mission.

There are eight soldier classes and eight MEC classes, not to mention some new guns to arm them with, including SMGs and sawed-off shotguns, along five tiers of weapons. A new feature is the ability of soldiers to "steady" their weapons as an action: this will give them improved aim on their next turn and is a handy alternative to overwatch. Explosives have been tweaked as well: instead of doing a fixed amount of damage, there's damage falloff the further the target is from the center of the blast.

Research has also been overhauled. Essentially, it takes longer to perform and has some additional requirements. For example, you'll need multiple alien bodies to perform autopsies (I guess a control group is handy) and the interrogation of a species requires that you've already autopsied that species (I guess showing your subject what happened to the last guy might loosen a few of his tongues). It adds deeper tech trees as a reward, however: just take a look at this lengthy rundown. You're not the only one doing research, either: in Long War, the aliens are trying to learn some new tricks and techs as well, and slowing their progress is a priority.

Access to psionics comes considerably earlier in the game, and the psionics tree has been expanded with new powers that can be unlocked by dissecting dead aliens or bracing living ones. There's a new system to promote and commission officers that replaces the medals system from Enemy Within, and officers can provide squad buffs during missions. The UFO interception game has been upgraded as well, with several new enemy ships and upgradable interceptors and individual pilots.

There's more, more, more. I'd suggest checking out the wikito browse the hundreds of changes, large and small, that Long War makes. Again, this is still a beta, so I can only assume there's more to come.

I wish I could give you more of a personal take on some of the new material, but I am utter garbage at XCOM, let alone a longer and more difficult modded XCOM, so I did not make a lot of progress through the game, with the exception of generating an enormous pile of dead soldiers. At least I can tell you that installation-wise it's all very easy: the mod has an auto-installer, though it will overwrite game files and disable multiplayer entirely, so be warned. Stability-wise, I didn't experience any issues: the mod ran perfectly. You can grab the latest beta from Nexus Mods.