Soldiers (Long War)

Squad

Long War's starting squad size is 6. It can be increased to 8 with Officer Training School upgrades as usual (though the prerequisites for the upgrades are a little different). When defending the XCOM HQ the squad size is fixed at 6. Covert extraction missions are fixed at 4 + the covert operative. The Super Skyranger upgrade will allow an additional 2 soldiers on alien base and Exalt HQ assaults, and an extra 4 soldiers on the final mission. To off-set the increased squad size, soldier classes have been made much more specific in their roles.

Classes

Like the base game, soldiers are divided in to 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. Long War allows you 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:

• Scout-Sniper -> Scout or Sniper
• Tactical -> Infantry or Assault
• Weapons -> Gunner or Rocketeer
• Support -> Medic or Engineer

If you don't want either of the classes for that soldier you can choose the third Random option to choose a random class of the other 6.

Fatigue

In Long War soldiers suffer from Fatigue. After finishing a mission they must rest for several days. You can push a soldier out while fatigued if you must, but then they'll need a longer rest session afterwards that you can't skip. This is very important to how you play the game, since your roster of soldiers must be much larger to allow rotating soldiers in and out due to fatigue.

Ideally, you should have about four full teams of soldiers (24-32), 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 Operation Sling-shot and Portent 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 highest soldier's rank.

Fatigue on soldiers also highlights the importance of the S.H.I.V, as they do not suffer any fatigue, meaning that they can effectively be taken on several missions in quick succession (provided they aren't damaged during a mission). However they do not gain any experience, which could be potentially given to soldiers.

Stats

The default option for Long War is that soldiers have randomized starting stats. The stats for soldiers are generated with a points system, so while soldiers will be different, their overall quality should be the same. The Second Wave option Strict Screening will give your soldiers fixed starting stats.

In addition to the normal stats of mobility, aim, will and HP, Long War soldiers also have a built in defence stat. In Long War you can expect your soldiers' starting Will to be much lower than in vanilla XCOM, making panic much more of a problem early game.

The aim progression of the various classes do not differ as wildly in Long War as they do in vanilla. For example, the vanilla Heavy gains +10 aim from ranks, compared to the vanilla Sniper's +40, for a 30 aim difference. In comparison, the Long War Engineer gains 14 aim to the Sniper's 32, a much smaller, though still significant, 18 aim difference. HP progression on the other hand differs slightly more between classes. In vanilla, excepting gains from perks, the classes all gain 4 HP except the Sniper who gains one less. In Long War HP progression varies from 2 HP up to 4 HP.