Air Combat (Long War)

UFOs are tougher, faster, and much more deadly in the Long War. Along with that, your crafts and armaments are significantly less potent, at least at first. You'll be needing to cycle your craft regularly (like your soldiers), as kills now grant a sort of XP to accuracy, as if your pilots learn UFO flight patterns and movements, and learn to fire with increasing accuracy with their experience.

The LW mod brings back a mechanic from previous generations of XCOM: UFOs can now have full DOA crashes (with minimal Alloy recovery, and no corpses or other artifacts), so in some cases you may want to pull your punches. To compensate, the Council will give cash rewards for UFOs obliterated in flight.

For starters, the Avalanche Missiles, on your fresh pilots, now have an abysmal 40% accuracy. While it is possible to still down the first Scout with one Interceptor, this is incredibly unlikely, and most likely it will take two, or even three interceptions to bring down these upgraded craft.

Secondly, UFOs now have altitude: high-flying and low-flying. High-flying craft have more or less the same mechanics as in vanilla XCOM (albet much more agressive due to their increased stats). Shooting them down from such an altitude causes more damage to the craft, and you'll often have the DOA results from these, or hear the Computers and Generators explode in the distance if you're allowed to assault the wreck. Low-flying craft have a high probability of landing, as the craft may be engaged in an active mission (ie; Abductions, Terror Strikes). If they do land, you may be able to assault it; your success disrupts their mission. In fact, you may want to allow low-flying craft to land, as without the EMP canon, landed UFOs are the only reliable way to get the Generators and Computers to build your Firestorms and Satellite Nexi. If you're using save-states, you should use them to see if a low-flying UFO will land; if not, you can always reload and take it down the old fashioned way.