Long War of the Chosen

Long War of the Chosen is a port of the original Long War 2 mod by Pavonis Interactive to XCOM 2’s War of the Chosen expansion. It is a complete overhaul of the vanilla game that attempts to make campaigns more engaging, longer and more challenging. Overall, you get more tools (items, abilities, soldier class types), but you have to deal with more enemies and a greater variety of enemies.

Here’s a quick summary of the major differences from the vanilla game:

• Build up the resistance by contacting regions and recruiting rebels in their havens
• Use those haven rebels to detect missions for you, which you must then infiltrate before they expire
• Send out multiple squads at a time, adjusting the equipment and composition to make sure they can infiltrate in time
• Watch as ADVENT reacts to your actions by strengthening regions (making missions more difficult) and sending retaliatory strikes on your havens
• Grapple with much more challenging versions of the Chosen both in the strategy layer and in retaliation missions (they no longer randomly spawn on missions)
• Discover a new research tree with several new techs and a bunch of new Proving Ground projects
• Make use of 8 new soldier classes that have 3 ability choices per rank and an extra rank (8 instead of vanilla’s 7)
• Get up to 2 of each faction soldier class, all of whom have been completely reworked from WOTC
• Train up officers that provide powerful buffs and abilities for your squad
• Play with buffed-up SPARKs and more challenging Alien Rulers if you have the corresponding DLCs installed
• Encounter entirely new enemies that force you to adapt your tactics

We have largely tried to keep as much of Long War 2 version 1.5 intact, but some things have changed to incorporate how WOTC works and we have also made some balance changes that we felt were worthwhile. You can find the major differences from Long War 2 on Ufopaedia[www.ufopaedia.org].

After subscribing to Long War of the Chosen and its required mods, make sure:

• You are also subscribed to the Alien Hunters Community Highlander if you have the Alien Hunters DLC installed
• You have frame rate smoothing disabled (that option breaks LWOTC – not our fault!)

As LWOTC is a complex overhaul of XCOM 2 WOTC, we suggest the following before you start a campaign:

• Start with the minimum required mods to check it’s working (the New Game button should be replaced by one titled "Long War (LWOTC)")
• Look for any LWOTC quality-of-life mod collections on Steam that will make the whole experience smoother
• Check out our resources for new players[github.com]
• Look at the Advanced Options (colloquially known as Second Wave Options) when starting a new campaign to check you have the settings you want
• Start on at least one difficulty level below what you’re used to in the base game, unless you’re already very familiar with Long War 2

Note that the campaign Advanced Options allow you to do things like disable the Chosen, disable the tutorial, and enable resistance orders.

Keep tabs on the project or get help via any of the following mediums:

• Project on GitHub[github.com] (raise issues, contribute changes, etc.)
• LWOTC Discord server[discord.gg]
• LWOTC subreddit

To see past and future changelogs for LWOTC, check out the releases on GitHub[github.com].

There are many people that have contributed to this project in one way or another. First, a big thank you to Pavonis Interactive for developing Long War 2 in the first place and then making the code available to others. Long War of the Chosen is still mostly that original Long War 2 code.

A special shout out goes to tracktwo, one of the Long War 2 team, without whose help this project would have stalled and probably been abandoned after a month or two.

The team of modders behind the Community Highlander (robojumper, Xymanek/AstralDescend, Musashi, Iridar) deserve special mention not only for the work on that mod, without which a lot of things in LWOTC simply wouldn’t be possible, but also for all the help and explanations as to how XCOM 2 WOTC mods work. The Community Highlander is also a big reason why LWOTC is compatible with a lot of WOTC mods.

In addition to the various mods that LWOTC depends on, we have also used the work of others directly in the mod, so many thanks to the following:

• Iridar for permission to use his More Psi Abilities, One Handed Templar, sawn-off shotgun (from LW2 Secondary Weapons, and EW mec weapons
• Musashi for permission to use his Ballistic Shields and throwing knives (from WotC Combat Knives.
• NotSoLoneWolf for permission to use his laser and coil strike rifles from Wolf’s Asset Pack
• InternetExploder for permission to use their Beam Grenade Launcher
• Favid for permission to use abilities from the [WOTC] Shadow Ops Perk Pack and their [WOTC] Extended Perk Pack
• Shiremct for permission to use abilities from [WOTC] Proficiency Class Pack
• bstar for permission to use abilities from their perk pack
• RedDobe for permission to use his Chosen avenger defense revamp mod and some of his sniper defense code
• The various folks that have been submitting pull requests
• The people that have provided translations for LWOTC:
  
  • Traditional and Simplified Chinese: cdq55555
  • Italian: SilentSlave
  • Russian: FlashVanMaster, XCOMrades & Aks
  • French: Savancosinus
  • Spanish: Pryda4ever
• All the folks that have been testing the development builds and providing feedback and issue reports