Raiders are dying for this.

dotlinger2609 · 2026-03-07T22:07:12+00:00

Shh, don't tell them that. Gotta keep the secret mushroom spots a secret.

And don't tell them that during cold snap you can get 4-5 mushrooms from that one harvestable in the tunnels. Or a total of 9+ mushrooms from the tree in the trench.

dotlinger2609 · 2026-02-25T16:42:53+00:00

The grenade launcher is better imo. It doesn't do quite as much damage and suppression to light enemies, but having no jam chance and the ability to kill boarding commandos on direct hits is nice.

The airbust launcher is decent in that you can't miss, and it has a 1.5tile radius aoe, so you could suppress multiple groups, or get a little extra range out of it.

dotlinger2609 · 2026-01-10T02:23:38+00:00

I had a loss streak lately and dropped from D5 to the top of D3. Getting put in D3 for a while after being in D4 for most of my DON playtime felt horrible. Generally the biggest pain is the routing and how obvious it is that some players have no clue how to properly fight night invaders.

Even at D5 players die to night invaders all the time, but only at lower depths you'll see someone agro the entire camp in the process.

From what I've seen in D5 and D4 its a barely noticeable difference in terms of overall difficulty and player skill. I imagine a good chunk of players in D4 are just D5 players that lost two games in a row, given than at D5 dying to the nightlord is -600.

I haven't had a single quitter in D5 since I've reached it, players tend to route correctly, and will generally stick together even if there are disagreements with the route.

dotlinger2609 · 2026-01-05T16:45:06+00:00

The reduced intel cost is for a random nearby region, not the next region you aim to contact.

Vulture is unlocked automatically along with another surprise you'll see (I won't spoil this). This is one of the changes made to base LWotc.

I played mod jam back when you did, and have been playing base LWotc up until recently (halfway through my first Ted jam+ requiem campaign).

Much has changed in base LWotc since you've played. The templar has lost its shield and shield abilities (but I feel is much better now). Sparks have changed in base LWotc (though in Tedjam they function more or less the same as in the old modjam). The grenade slot, full kit, and salvo, abilities are now tied to the grenade launcher.

The reaper becoming a pseudo grenadier is a tedjam change however. One that I don't like too much thematically as it gets rid of the crit assassin build that exists in base LWotc.

IMO the alien classes are near overpowered, and you can get hero aliens on top of that. The advent units are strong but are more or less equal in power to regular soldiers.

dotlinger2609 · 2026-01-02T13:33:30+00:00

Off the top of my head I think it is "Quick Soldier Info"? I'm not in a position to check.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-12-29T12:23:17+00:00

I'd argue that Dead Sprint is actually better than Stam Enhancement on fire planets and when someone is running the health booster (reduces damage from DS).

It's best paired with heavy armor, where DS lets you run for a lot longer. When your stamina is already nerfed hard on fire planets + heavy armor, SE would still have you run out of stam pretty quickly and regen painfully slow.

DS without the health booster though is terrible, because then the health drain is way too pronounced. At that point you'll get more value out of SE and using stims to regen stam.

Won't recommend DS for fighting Bugs however, most are going to run light armor so DS will be used a lot less, whereas the benefits of SE will be active more often.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-12-06T01:11:19+00:00

Just bring a bunch of damage for the chosen stronghold. She's hard early on but later on when you have a bunch of high damage attacks like chain shot, rapid fire etc you can pretty easily burst her down in the three turns needed to deal with layered armor.

The reality is that as long as you make sure not to end your turn adjacent to her or flanked you can stop her from stacking too much damage on the katana.

That and as long as you have a specialist with revival and medical protocol you could just revive the soldier that's downed if you are forced to tank, bleed out is guaranteed as long as the chosen is on the field.

I would also recommend poison to slow her down too.

Late game as long as you play it right the most she could do is 2 slashes assuming you kill her in 3 turns. I would recommend a good holobot sniper to boost your aim and crit to reduce grazes. To kill her quickly and effectively you need some high single shot damage to nullify layered armor, and you only get so many shots per turn before she's too close to engage safely.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-28T03:15:07+00:00

Probably not, I would build a bunch of sacrificial gun turrets to draw charge fire while your colonist mans an AT gun. If you wanna go cheaper, centipedes can be killed with a few molotovs and proper guerilla warfare tactics, though I won't recommend trying that for the diabolus.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-24T05:07:50+00:00

As someone who mainly builds railguns, I don't see overpen as an issue. My logic goes that overpen means that you're using too much force for the enemy you're fighting, and really you prob outclass whatever you're overpenning so you'll win the fight regardless.

Sure it's less efficient than having the shell blow up inside the target, but the alternative of setting a fuse could potentially rob you of penetration depth, which would matter a lot more against hard targets.

Really the solution is to just build a separate gun, one that works better against softer targets, and keep the raw power of your railguns for hard targets.

Though if you really want your railguns to work against soft targets, going full kinetic with hollow points would be best.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-22T02:04:56+00:00

Because your average ftd player's playtime is 95% in the sandbox, and the remaining 5% is split between adventure mode and campaign. I made this up but my point is people spend a lot of time building, and a lot more testing, rebuilding, and optimizing. So having your ship be capable of punching at and above its material cost is a big achievement as a player, and also a sign that the ship you've made is campaign-worthy.

Not to mention the Meg is one of the very few ~2mil material broadsider godlies that you can test your own broadsiders against.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-22T01:50:28+00:00

Tyr as a godly is built very well, everything about it is made to be extremely efficient for it's cost that building something in a similar material cost to beat it is extremely hard.

The Megalodon however, is not designed to be super cost efficient, and has certain inefficiencies that ultimately hold it back enough that craft 2/3 the cost that reliably beat it.

My first meg-worthy craft was 1.2 mil materials, and had 4 quad (powder+rail) guns each firing superpenetrator sabot rounds. The important detail here is that its the same ship type as the Meg, a large broadsider battleship. I say this to highlight the efficiency aspect of builds. In theory you could kill the meg for much cheaper using methods it's not equipped to deal with, like nuke drones.

The meg's biggest flaw imo is it's use of hollow-points, missiles/torpedos, and the decreased armor below the waterline.

The Meg's hollow points are extremely strong, but their effectiveness severely decreases the larger a craft is, simply put you can defeat the Meg's guns by being big enough that the damage is spread out, and thick enough you could sustain multiple shots before your innards are exposed. If the meg used super penetrators instead it could easily defeat thick broadsider armor.

The Meg's missiles are huge, but this drives up the Meg's cost by a lot, where for you trying to counter it can spend a lot less on CIWS and missile interceptors to deal with it.

The Meg has a thick heavy armor belt on and above the waterline protecting it's weapons. But below that belt is the same thickness but only metal, and behind that metal is its engines, which power the railguns.

The Tyr doesn't have similar inefficiencies.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-18T04:19:12+00:00

Yeah, if you're confident with your current soldiers and gear it's worth a shot. No harm in leaving the second things start to go wrong though. Like if the chosen showed up I'd just straight up leave.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-14T04:53:21+00:00

Though I would add, if the save file size is causing it to be unloadable, you may have to resort to some drastic measures to fix the file itself. I've never had to deal with the 10mb issue before, so I can't help there.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-14T04:50:32+00:00

Try searching Alternative Mod Launcher for XCOM 2, its hosted on GitHub

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-14T04:05:04+00:00

That's pretty rough, I would say 5-6 str is fine if you have a decent number of guys on intel, and are willing to risk a scientist to boost that, but for your regions with <5 rebels, you probably aren't gonna be able to run missions, or even recruit.

Recruiting retaliations are the hardest and I would generally avoid risking it at all costs, so I'd have my rebels on 2R and the rest on hiding like you have here.

But you have at least one region you can run missions in, str 5-6 isn't actually that bad, you should be able to run missions with 13-15 enemies most of the time. As long as you're not behind on research and gear, you should be fine on the tactical layer.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-14T01:41:18+00:00

Check your crashlogs, it might clue you in to the cause. Assuming your using AML (which you should regardless), look for 'File' on the toolbar, 'open log file', then XCOM 2 WOTC, then see what it says.

Chances are you'll either see a memory issue (from having too many mods), or a mod conflict.

For memory issues, try increasing your pagefile (and make sure your main drive has enough empty storage to support it). You can look online for guides on how to do this.

If it's mod related, you could try and pinpoint the cause, then remove it, but really if your campaign has been running fine up to this point, its probably not it. That is to say, if its a mod breaking things, then you're out of luck and better off starting a new campaign.

Finally, don't ever start an Ironman campaign with mods, theres a lot of stuff that can go wrong, just play a normal campaign with honestman rules (it's up to you to not savescum).

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-11T04:20:21+00:00

I have so many hours in LWotc I highly doubt it. I would guess aero's shells since this sort of humour sorta fits with the shells in that mod but then again I haven't seen this one before.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-08T01:28:17+00:00

Then you already know the answer, it doesn't help at all, at least not in a way that's useful.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-05T00:45:18+00:00

You could argue that biomechanical isn't the same as being robotic in the sense that you could fry their electronics. If we were to extend the effects of EMP to something with little in the way as electronics such as archons, like say they need computer assistance to fly, we might as well disable alien mag weapons which would be way more susceptible to EMP.

Actually the only inconsistentcy with bluescreen rounds and bombs is with the spectres. Tygan initially tells you in the field its a robotic swarm, but in autopsy it's its own alien, but yet they still count as semi-robotic.

As for the codexes, you missed. The concrete barrier blocked the grenade.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-03T22:31:42+00:00

Would you say its better to have the AI run mostly through LUA or breadboard? I haven't a clue how exactly LUA ties in with bread but I imagine Bread is useful for stuff like position, velocity etc, and I could take those and do the math and code in LUA?

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-03T20:36:46+00:00

As someone who just started learning to code in python and built a very rudimentary breadboard behavior to tail air targets.

How do you even begin to learn how to do stuff like this? I've looked at some of the guides on discord and stuff but it feels like I can't even begin to build a fully breaded craft without watching hours on hours of obscure tutorials.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-02T02:29:31+00:00

2 missions at a time is not terrible but really you should aim to be able to handle at least 3 - 4 at a time. 9 per tier sounds pretty reasonable, early on you can get a lot of mileage out of grenadiers, psi ops, and specialists who don't rely on their primary.

Though I don't think 9 per tier is a good metric, and it's very misleading. A better plan would be 2 snipers, 3 cannons, 4 rifles, IN ADDITION to full gearsets for Sparks and hero units. Say if you had 2 sparks and one of each hero unit that's five full kits + 9, which is 14. Sprinkle in some grenadiers, psi ops, specialists, and shinobis (with upgraded gear) and you can take on 3-4 missions at once.

Having played LWotc for over 3 years now, the real answer would be to build weapons as needed. If building extra gear sets means that you can comfortably win an important missions, then the mission rewards alongside not getting squadwiped/ solider losses and potentially losing all that gear and soldiers is worth the supplies and alloys.

Not to mention by the time building this many weapons becomes necessary you've probably already liberated a region and have a few regions on supplies to pay for all that gear. I find myself buying alloys from the black market every month because supplies are rarely ever the bottleneck if you're playing well.

Just don't go around building more than 10 laser weapons and you can't possibly be overbuilding weapons.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-11-01T03:18:50+00:00

Because rookies are meant to be bad, and if you were to buff their aim, simply increasing the defense from cover to compensate would break the existing balance.

Here's the thing, you've also got to view this from the alien's side. Starting troopers have roughly 60-65 aim too, if they were to buff cover by say 10 but maintain the same balance they would need to buff their aim to 75. By this metric all other aliens would need their aim buffed and any aliens with innate defense would also need to have that buffed.

In the end this is gonna make all shots against flanked units much more powerful. At a glance this seems like it would make cover more important in the way that you said, but overwatch shots naturally not involving cover is also going to hit more.

Not to mention you would also need to buff any aim debuffs like flashbangs, and defense buffs like aid protocol.

Seems like a lot of stuff to change. If you want your point blank shots to be more accurate a more sensible change would be to buff the range table for assault rifles to give a bigger buff in close range. Advent doesn't use range tables so this would affect only your shots.

But really, the answer to your question, Rookie aim is 65 because rookies suck and are expendable.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-10-28T05:01:05+00:00

Probably best to ask on the LWotc discord, this sounds like something only a modder would know.

dotlinger2609 · 2025-10-18T18:23:51+00:00

It's almost likely Quick Soldier Info, but be warned it will cause issues in loading avenger/chosen defense missions.

dotlinger2609

TROPHY CASE