Building satellites and workshops does not increase the number of scientists and engineers on your team - these personnel have to be earned as rewards via abduction missions, Council missions, and as rewards for doing the various Council nations favours of one kind or another. The Long War is exactly that - a gruelling campaign in which normal vanilla tactics of satellite spam and tech rush to beam weapons do not apply. In vanilla my squaddies would already be rocking carapace armour, laser rifles and accompanied by a Mech or two to boot in the equivalent time period. For one, my troops in my test run are still wearing default gear.
I've done two dry runs, playing games until May (the game begins in March 2016) and there are significant differences. For those already familiar with vanilla X-Com (X-Com: The Enemy Within plus the two DLCs, Operations Slingshot and Progeny) X-Com: The Long War is a community made mod which completely overhauls the X-Com experience, and turns an already great game into something truly, truly epic. R ather than starting a new vanilla game from scratch, I decided to mix things up and try out the Long War mod. Yes, I'm a masochist at heart, but hey, it's my own play time and preference, and I like the added sense of danger for my brave band of virtual soldiers. My second ever blog post was on X-Com, and I have played the snot out of this game, beating it on Impossible difficulty on Ironman. It has won a stack of awards, and is one of my favourite games of all time. For those unfamiliar to X-Com, it is a squad level tactical turn based game in which the united governments of Earth try to stave off an alien invasion. It's still shy of being a half a year away though, and as a preamble to release I thought I'd dust off the X-Com reboot and give it another go. The sequel to X-Com is scheduled for release in February 2016, and as a long time fan of both the original DOS titles and the reboot released a few years ago I have to admit to being very excited about this news.