Soldiers (LWR)

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Squad Sizes

Squad sizes in Long War Rebalance vary depending on the mission type. They can not be increased through Officer Training School upgrades.

 * Abductions, Council, Terror, and Covert Op Data Recovery missions: 6 soldiers
 * UFO raids, DLC Missions, and Base Assaults: 8 soldiers
 * Covert Op Extractions: 2 soldiers
 * Temple Assault: 7-10 soldiers (7 + 1 for every 5 council nations still supporting XCOM)

Note: The We are Legion (#25) Second Wave option allows bringing 2 additional soldiers on both Covert Operative missions.

Classes

Like the base game, soldiers are divided into classes. Soldiers start out as Privates (analogous to Rookies), where they have no class, and when they progress to Specialist (equivalent to Squaddie) they are assigned a class. You have some control over which class the Private is assigned to; when a soldier becomes a Specialist, they will be assigned a specialism of Tactical, Weapons, Scout-Sniper, or Support. You can then choose between the two classes for each specialism by choosing the appropriate perk.

The Long War Rebalance classes are all designed with certain roles in mind, and they work best if they have other roles that synergize with them. For example, a Gunner's ability to Suppress works well with an Assault, as the Gunner can pin an enemy and prevent it from overwatching while the Assault moves up for a flank. Alternatively, a Medic can cancel out overwatch fire for the Assault using Concussion Grenades with Smoke and Mirrors, allowing the Assault to move up, providing cover with a Smoke Grenade afterwards.

Fatigue

Like in Long War, soldiers become fatigued after each mission, requiring some time to rest before being deployed again. However, fatigue duration now scales with the number of turns that passed during the mission, and fatigue is no longer increased for officers, gene-modded, and psionic soldiers. Note that the Second Wave option Consistent Fatigue (#35) disables fatigue scaling and reverts to a higher base fatigue value, like in Long War.

The base fatigue per mission is 1 day, and Soldiers and MECs receive 6 additional hours of fatigue for each turn that passes. Soldiers and MECs that receive more than 6 days of fatigue (around 20+ turns into a mission) will become injured for the duration of their fatigue time, plus 3 additional days.

Fatigued soldiers may still be deployed on a mission, but will suffer a light injury afterwards, and injured soldiers must recover before being deployed again.

Ideally, you should have several teams of soldiers ready at any given point. This means that you can take most missions that the game will throw at you, which can sometimes be three in a row, especially if the Slingshot and Progeny DLC are activated. Try to spread the experience around, and take advantage of easier missions to get low rank soldiers - the last thing you want is for an important mission to come up and only have raw recruits ready to go. Note that OTS upgrades are no longer tied to your soldier ranks, but instead your number of successful missions.

Injury Time

Injuries work the same as they did in Long War, but are increased by around 50% overall.

The "max timeout" (injury time) scales based on the amount time elapsed in the campaign. The reason for this is that:

1) If max timeout is long, then the first months are too brutal, since it's difficult to get soldiers leveled
2) If the max timeout is short, then the later months are too easy, because with foundry/genemod reductions and armor soldiers are wounded for too little

This is basically a factor in vanilla's inverse difficulty curve, which the scaling max timeout is intended to correct.

Basically the BASE_DAYS_INJURED is the max injury timeout that can ever happen, and only happens after much time has elapsed. So the default value of 2400 hours = 100 days represents the maximum possible injury portion of a timeout.

However, this is scaled based on the campaign time elapsed, and this scaling formula can be tweaked using the two values packed into RAND_DAYS_INJURED. The two default values are 27 and 45, and they go into the formula as: 27 / ( Days + 45).

With Day = 0, this results in 27 / 45 = 0.6, so the maximum injury timeout on day 0 is reduced by 60% to 55 * (1 - 0.6) = 22 days of injury timeout.
With Day = 30, this results in 27 / (30 + 45) = 0.36, so the maximum injury timeout after 1 month is reduced by 36% to 55 * (1 - 0.36) = 35.2 days of injury timeout.

As time goes on, this asymptotically approaches the defined maximum injury timeout.

A couple of notes about all of this:

• Fatigue timeout is always added to injury timeout for wounded soldiers (thus generally making it that injured soldiers are wounded for longer than soldiers are fatigued). Originally the max injury timeout was 60 days, but since the base fatigue timeout is 3-5 days, this was reduced by 5 days. Thus officers/psi/gene-modded soldiers also get injured for longer times because of their increased fatigue timeouts
• Soldier injury timeout is randomized with a linearly scaled block based on % HP lost. If a soldier has lost 2 out of 6 max HP, then she uniformly randomly gets between 1/6 and 2/6 of the current max injury timeout. For a barely wounded soldier that has lost 1 out of 6 max HP, this means between 0/6 (minimum 1 hour) and 1/6 of the current max injury timeout. Since a soldier can't get to losing 6 out 6 max (because the soldier would be dead), the only way to roll in the 5/6 to 6/6 category is to have been critically injured and the stabilized/revived during the mission.
  

Stats

By default in Long War Rebalance, soldiers have fully randomized starting stats, rather than using the point system in Long War. However, the starting 15 soldiers will have preset, non-random stats. Note that multiple Second Wave options exist that can change this. Balanced Soldiers (#31) will re-enable the point system for randomly-generated soldiers, and Fresh Recruits (#33) will replaces the starting 15 soldiers with randomly-generated ones.

Unlike Long War, soldiers no longer have a randomized Defense stat, and starting stat ranges for soldiers have been increased to make them more distinct from one another.

Stat progression for soldier ranks has been altered to provide half of the stats at SPEC rank, and the remaining stats are distributed evenly over the remaining ranks. This makes it less punishing to lose high-ranking soldiers, and contributes to normalizing the mod's difficulty curve.

Class	total	total	total*	bonus
Assault	2	5	10	0.6
Infantry	2	15	20	0
Rocketeer	3	5	10	0
Gunner	2	5	10	0
Sniper	0	20	5	0
Scout	0	10	15	0.6
Medic	0	10	20	0
Engineer	1	10	20	0

* All soldiers have a chance to gain an extra 1 will per level, for up to 7 additional will over their class baseline.

Soldiers at MSGT rank have a chance to gain +1 in each stat after each mission: 5% chance for mobility, 10% chance for HP, 20% chance for aim, and 40% chance for will. These chances are increased or reduced by 1% for each point lower or higher the soldier's stats are compared to the natural maximum base stats, respectively.

See also

Long War Rebalance: Soldiers
	Soldiers Assault Infantry Rocketeer Gunner Sniper Scout Medic Engineer
	MEC Troopers Marauder Goliath Jaeger Shogun
	Officers Psionics Gene Mods S.H.I.V.s