Working on a Technical build for your Long War 2 run? I recommend these perks: 

• Fire in the Hole
• Napalm-X
• Burnout
• Formidable
• Incinerator
• Tactical Sense
• Bunker Buster

No doubt about it—the Technical’s value depends entirely on the use of their cover-busting rocket and their debilitating flamer, and while you can simply focus on one or the other when choosing your perks, this build attempts to make the best of both their strengths while trading out their weaknesses.Fire in the Hole gives a much needed boost to early rocket accuracy, and Napalm-X improves the flamer’s main use—crowd control. Setting enemies on fire already stops them from making ranged attacks, but when an enemy resists the chance-based flame debuff, now you’re also forcing them to roll for disorient and panic, making it more likely that one way or another, your toasty target will be too traumatized to hit back.

Burnout, Formidable, Incinerator and Tactical Sense are our picks to address one big problem the Technical has; you need to get close to apply your liberating napalm to the aliens. These perks massively boost your trooper’s survivability and add extra range to their flamethrower, both meaning they can stay safer while fulfilling their main role of fire-based crowd control.Bunker Buster caps off our tree by providing additional AoE damage and, more importantly, a massive environmental damage nuke that tears apart the cover most of your enemies depend on. It takes both the things we love normal Rockets for and turns them up to eleven.

It’s worth looking at the enticing perks we don’t take with this build and the reasons behind our decisions. Biggest Booms, Tandem Warheads and Javelin Rockets are all tempting, but when most of our Technical time will be spent rolling with just one rocket, over-investing in its damage and range forgets that its main benefit is on-the-spot cover destruction; leave damage to the rest of your squad once the Technical’s blast has exposed your enemies at a pivotal moment in your mission. 

Meanwhile, Salvo and Quickburn are both double-down perks better left to vanilla; with Fire in the Hole and Napalm-X your rockets and flame attacks should be achieving reliable results already, and in the majority of scenarios, blasting out two of your precious heavy weapon charges per turn is often going to be an overexuberance rather than a measured necessity—better to run Tactical Sense and perform your close-range flaming with confidence every time.

Lastly, Concussion Rocket sounds like fun—who doesn’t like more rockets, and more disables to apply to your enemies to boot—but ultimately, disorient is a debuff XCOM can already apply easily with their readily-available arsenal of flashbangs. With the amount we’ll be looking to charge in and flame, Burnout should keep us safe—even in the event your aggressive charge backfires and you find yourself flanked, as the smoke it provides cancels out the critical bonus you suffer from being exposed.

With our combination of cover-busting and crowd control, our Thermobaric Technical is an asset ready to bail you out of a bad situation or push through a tough stalemate like no-one else can. Spend their limited heavy weapons charges wisely at pivotal points in your missions, and their burning and blasting won’t let you down.

 John "Beagle" Teasdale has sent a lot of aliens to alien heaven. Check out his XCOM videos (and karaoke skills) at youtube.com/beaglerush.

Working on a Technical build for your Long War 2 run? I recommend these perks: 

• Ghostwalker
• Lone Wolf
• Covert
• Bladestorm
• Conceal
• Tradecraft
• Rapid Fire

The Shinobi tree is littered with tempting combat-focused perks that sound excitingly effective, so it’s important we understand the real strength of the class—Concealment is absurd. Other classes can compete with and surpass the damage or defensive capability of even the most combat-oriented Shinobi, but none can compare to their dangerously cheesy mastery of becoming practically invisible. With that in mind, we want to restrain ourselves from indulging in the more action-oriented choices such as Cutthroat and Coup de Grâce, and instead focus on our Shinobi's real goal—be unseen, unheard, and let the rest of the squad benefit from the absolute wealth of reconnaissance information our hidden ghost can provide.

Ghostwalker, Covert and Conceal all build towards this goal. Respectively, they’ll provide you with an 40% reduced detection range on a cooldown, a 20% smaller detection range all the time, and the ability to re-enter Concealment once per mission. Between the three of them, the only time you should be getting detected is when you wish it so, by swiping objectives or assassinating weak, lone enemies—and even once your cover’s blown, you can just pop back into stealth and carry on with your important sneaking duties.

Lone Wolf provides extra aim and, more importantly, defense for when you’re operating far from allies, as most Shinobis should aim to do. Bladestorm provides an interesting combat niche for your trooper in those rare scenarios where Concealment is no longer helpful to you—you’d be surprised how much value you can wring out of this perk in the right situation, and versus the undeniably limited versatility of Shadowstrike and Evasive, it’s the best bang for your buck in its section.

While the Shinobi’s constant Phantom Concealment is an incredibly powerful tool—in my opinion, perhaps the most powerful ability in the XCOM series to date—an important fact to remember is this trooper will be an unavoidably weaker fighter than any other. Rapid Fire helps offset this, with its constant double-fire action providing the damage boost the class needs to stay relevant when your squad killing every alien in sight is the only acceptable solution to a given turn.

Finally, Tradecraft helps address the Shinobi’s combat weaknesses in a different way. By significantly reducing the soldier’s infiltration time, Tradecraft makes bringing the Shinobi more of a free bonus than a trade off. The extra infiltration time you’ll save allows you to bring another, more damage-focused class to pick up the Shinobi’s slack while they focus on sneaky recon.

Used properly, Shinobis provide excellent flank security and forward recon, screening out accidental, unwanted activations and ensuring the only enemies who spot you are the ones you’re ready to kill. Their stealth means they’re also capable of taking on some mission types entirely on their own, though the all-or-nothing stakes of dodging patrols or dying alone makes solo sneaking an approach not for the faint of heart. 

John "Beagle" Teasdale has sent a lot of aliens to alien heaven. Check out his XCOM videos (and karaoke skills) at youtube.com/beaglerush.

Long War 2’s main focus is a massive overhaul of the strategy layer, providing a significant revamp to the depth and complexity of your activities in XCOM 2’s geoscape. But with this complexity comes a variety of new concerns and questions when you’re starting out with Long War 2’s expanded campaigns—read on for a few tips to get to grips with your increased responsibilities as the world’s most important Commander.

#1 Intelligence is Key

It should be no surprise that the key to getting your early game ball rolling is effective prioritization of your resources—and in this case, Intelligence is one of the best things to focus on. When managing your initial Resistance Haven, focus all your starting rebels on the Intel job.This accomplishes a few important things. For one, it gives you the best chance of detecting missions early and often, giving you plenty of opportunities to gain resources and plenty of time to approach them with. As your troops are weak and inexperienced early on, it’s important to aim for the most generous infiltration times possible to balance that out with larger squads. 

Even if you want to try one-man stealth approaches to certain operations, an Intel focus means you’ll detect more missions in general, allowing you to amass more rewards and resources to speed up XCOM’s development. When your troops are more experienced and your havens are better developed, you can afford to start switching some rebels to Supply and Recruit.

As an additional bonus, Intel rebels provide small amounts of the Intel resource, important for expanding to new regions. Speaking of which...

#2 Expand your Land

In vanilla XCOM 2, you contact new regions to reach ADVENT Blacksites, Facilities and Story Objectives. In Long War 2, expansion is far more pivotal to your success, and ignoring it for too long can have dire consequences.For one, setting up Havens in new regions allows you start performing the Intel job there, opening up a whole new area of potential missions you can detect and infiltrate. Like any good strategy game, that also means it’s core to ramping up your economy—steadily establishing and developing new Havens is important to scaling up your Supply and Intel income, not to mention the wealth of new mission rewards you can benefit from.

But perhaps even more important than the positives you enjoy from expanding are the negatives you suffer from staying small. Every mission that goes undetected and unbeaten around the world can potentially be advancing alien goals like introducing Dark Events, and if you don’t spread your reach to  start interfering with these operations, you’ll eventually be overwhelmed by the unrestrained power of an unopposed ADVENT occupation force.

Additionally, XCOM activity in any given region increases the ADVENT strength there as they pay attention to the growing resistance movement, making missions in that part of the world feature tougher and more numerous enemies. Expanding your global reach allows you to maneuver strategically to focus on exploiting the world’s least-defended regions, ensuring you aren’t backed into a strategic corner where your only choice is to take on harder and harder opposition as your only region’s ADVENT strength grows higher and higher.

#3 Go Hard and Fast, or Smooth and Sneaky

Long War 2’s extended infiltration mechanic means you’ll be planning the theme of your missions on the geoscape long before any boots hit the ground. It’s important to take a good look at the mission type, infiltration time and your available troop roster and pick a realistic strategy with an achievable outcome.In the early game when timed missions are at their most common, seek to beat the rush by either going all-out aggressive or high-speed sneaky. Large teams featuring Technicals, Grenadiers and Assaults excel at blasting their way through contact and maintaining a steady advance to achieve objectives that are well-defended by ADVENT opposition. Small squads of Shinobis and Specialists, meanwhile, are perfect for avoiding the enemy completely and sniping hack-based objectives from afar.

In either case, tailor your approach to what you have available. If the mission objective is hack-related but you don’t have any Specialists, you’ll have to get up close to achieve the objective, making stealthy approaches more difficult. On the other hand, if you don’t have any Technicals or Grenadiers handy for a more combat-focused approach, it’s easy to get bogged down in a cover-to-cover firefight that bleeds out the timer before you can push through and accomplish your goals. When you just don’t have the tools available for the job, or the infiltration timer of a mission is too short to bring those key things you depend on, it’s a good time to consider ignoring the mission completely. Knowing when a mission is fundamentally unwinnable is the difference between simply missing out on a reward and losing an entire squad because of your greed.

#4 Don’t Get Comfortable

When you first load up Long War 2’s geoscape, you might be relieved to note the absence of the AVATAR project clock—but don’t be fooled, because global doom is still ticking along whether you can see it or not. Dally too long and your resistance war will become a losing one all too quickly; keep your eyes on the prize and your focus on strategic objectives from the moment you start your campaign. With your Havens and your base developing, keep your eye out for operations that mention ‘leads’ in their rewards—finding these leads is critical to fully liberating the regions you operate in, which in turn is a crucial part of your campaign to liberate Earth. Once you’re capable of freeing regions, keep your soldiers and technology developing in preparation to take on the more challenging story missions you’ll discover—get your boys and girls trained up and decked out and start sniffing out and tearing up ADVENT’s most critical military installations.

These early game pointers should get you moving in the right direction for your first Long War 2 campaign, and with some experience and a little luck, you should have all you need to free Earth from ADVENT’s clutches. Good luck—as always, the world is counting on you.

John "Beagle" Teasdale has sent a lot of aliens to alien heaven. Check out his XCOM videos (and karaoke skills) at youtube.com/beaglerush.

The Long War 2 is great, but the modding community can make anything better. TLW2 is a total overhaul that affects almost all of XCOM 2's systems, which ought to make it hard to mod without causing conflicts. However, a useful Long War 2 compatibility list is being regularly updated on Reddit and there are dozens of mods worth subscribing to via XCOM 2's Steam Workshop.

As we're loading a bunch of criss-crossing mods at the same time, normal caveats apply. There's always a chance that conflicts could cause problems, so save regularly. Having said that, I've been playing with all these mods on alongside The Long War 2 and haven't experienced any problems. If you're looking to supplement your Long War 2 campaign, they should be a good bet. To install, simply follow the link to the Workshop page and click the green 'subscribe' button.

New enemies and maps

A Better ADVENT has already been updated to work with The Long War 2, adding even more alien variants to the enemy pool. Instead of raising the difficulty with super-hard monsters (there are quite enough of those in the game already), the mod focuses on giving the aliens a greater range of loadouts and behaviours. Expect baby Chryssalids, Sectoid soldiers and some funky new shades of ADVENT soldier.

In addition to new enemies, consider subscribing to some map mods to mix up terrain generation and introduce some extra challenge to the campaign. The More Maps Pack adds new layouts to terrain generation. Additional Mission Types is worth a look if you want some extra variations on some of The Long War 2's new scenarios. Avenger Events adds a few dilemmas specifically designed for The Long War 2.

Soldier customisation

The Long War 2 seems to work happily with mods that add new props to your armoury. Capnpub's Accessories Pack adds some excellent headgear, including berets and night vision goggles, that look completely suited to XCOM 2's aesthetic. If you prefer a futuristic look then Stenchfury's Modular Armor and Modular Helmets adds Mass Effect style gear with plenty of sleek surfaces and tiny lights. The armour mod also adds shoulder pieces such as the impractical but cool over-the-shoulder combat lamp. It's very Aliens. Also, as you can see above, you can give soldiers two sets of night-vision goggles for very dark nights.

These mods are all enhanced by the self-explanatory More Armour Colours mod. I love the simple Uniforms mod too, which simply lets you save outfits and apply them to new soldiers much more quickly. If you enjoy XCOM 2's multinational flavour then subscribe to the International Voices pack for extra Russian and Polish voices. Oh, and you naturally might want the Unlocked Customisation mod, which will low-level soldiers access all customisations as soon as you recruit them.

User Interface

XCOM 2's user interface is decent, but you can always have more data. Perfect Information displays hit, crit and dodge figures to attacks made by XCOM recruits and aliens in combat, which allows you to laugh at aliens that completely whiff a 90 percent shot. Additional Icons adds a collection of stats above alien health bars, displaying the damage of the enemy's primary weapon, their aim stat, movement range and health. There is also an icon that tells you whether an alien is carrying loot or not. This might feel like cheating, but you can toggle any of the stats off in the mod's .ini file.

There are a few small, frivolous mods that are worth a look. Mission Award Variety changes the awards that appear at the end of a mission—I particularly empathise with the "Hates Stun Lancers The Most" award. On the Avenger base view, Restored Avenger Navigation lets you pan the view with WASD again, rather than flicking between rooms.

Those are the best I've found so far. The Steam Workshop and XCOM 2's mod management interface makes it beautifully easy to flick these on or off in any combination, so experiment away. If you've found some good ones, do share them in the comments.

The word 'mod' undersells The Long War 2. 'Mod' implies an aesthetic tweak, a UI correction, a new weapon perhaps. In fact this is XCOM 2 as developed in a parallel universe. The Long War 2 does add lots of new weapons, classes and skills, but all these service a set of bespoke design aims that turn XCOM 2 from a survival strategy game into a gradually paced army and territory management sim with expanded combat encounters.

For players that have mastered XCOM 2's story and power arcs, or now find them predictable, Long War 2 is an essential download. The mod forces you to break out of your habits and re-engage with the game again at the most basic level. Even soldiers are valued differently. You can field up to ten in a mission, and you start with a large roster. Consequently, losing agents isn't the body blow it can be in trad XCOM, and you have more room to experiment with ability and weapon combinations across your force.

Your whole stance as resistance commander feels different to ordinary XCOM 2, which forces you into a reactive position with must-fight emergency missions. In The Long War 2 missions are more like leads that you can choose to spend time and resources to follow up. Ordinary missions are preceded by an infiltration period that asks you to devote a squad to a location for a variable number of days. If they achieve a high degree of infiltration (represented by a percentage marker that ticks upwards with each day), they face weaker forces in that mission.

This introduces some new opportunities to XCOM 2. Firstly, you can take a pass on missions. Second: it's entirely viable, and often useful, to send an under-strength squad to a mission, because smaller squads can infiltrate more quickly and effectively. This creates an interesting separation within your roster, between large teams of newbies and small teams of highly-levelled, well-equipped crack special forces operatives. Moving between sub-squads introduces more variety to combat encounters as well. In XCOM 2 you're likely to develop a small team of very precious warriors. In the Long War you nurture a broad, diverse stable over a longer period.

Even if you decide to deploy a small squad, combat encounters tend to be busier. Enemy reinforcements can drop in while you're waiting for extraction. If a mission is going badly and you choose to extract, you have to wait longer for your ship to arrive, and thus fend off more enemies. There are new enemy varieties too, such as colour-coded versions of ordinary advent soldiers with different loadouts and behaviours. These expanded firefights have an interesting effect on the way chance operates. By growing the number of chance rolls the game makes, the effects of variance are reduced over time. You will still see massive swings of good and bad luck of course, but the length of the campaign and the reduced value of soldiers softens XCOM 2's harshest elements. The extra bit of ablative armour that recruits wear also helps.

The extra soldiers and the glut of missions gives you more room to enjoy the new classes. The sword-wielding Shinobi shares some similarity to the assault class, but with a much greater emphasis on stealth and ambush tactics. At high levels, with the right skills, Shinobi can break stealth, attack multiple enemies and re-enter concealment, or mitigate damage with buffed evasion rolls (dodging an attack means you take a small amount of 'graze' damage, far preferable to the full-whack when fighting mid-tier enemies upwards). They are supported by knives and swords, and benefit from the new SMG weapons, which let you sacrifice mid-range accuracy for speed. There's also a new Technical class, members of which wields a wrist-mounted flame-thrower/rocket launcher secondary combo weapon, which is as amazing as it sounds.

There are plenty of new mission types for these new soldiers to tackle, including prison break-outs and enemy base assaults. The rewards for these missions have been redesigned to affect the heavily reworked map layer. You still fly the Avenger around the globe to camp on spots and suck up resources or activate missions, but The Long War 2 introduces an additional layer of territory management. Once you've made contact with the resistance in an area you can assign resistance members based there to different jobs that generate supply and intel. You can assign engineers and scientists to regions to supply additional boosts. Resistance members can also fend off alien influence in an area, and Advent moves troops around on the map in an effort to install new alien bases and move the Avatar project forward.

The changes bring a dose of 4X strategy to XCOM 2. This slows the pace considerably—this is the Long War, after all. This dilutes the impact and drama of an XCOM 2 campaign to an extent. The way the core game gives you a narrow stream of high-stakes decisions is one of the reasons I loved it so much when I reviewed it last year. However I've found it fascinating to see how XCOM's core mechanics work in this new context. The Long War 2 is a thoughtful and effective reworking of the XCOM 2 formula, and the new weapon, class and mission additions are slick and well-integrated—they could have come from Firaxis.

Speaking of Firaxis, it's great to see studios work with modders, particularly in instances where the mod team wants to substantially rework the studio's original vision. The result is a neat Earth-B take on the concept that unlocks hundreds of hours of extra playtime. The Long War 2 is out now, and it's free.