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 data recovery 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.

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, or they will suffer a penalty to their effectiveness in the next mission equivalent to the Light Wound debuff. 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.

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, while World Diversity will allow the algorithm to generate soldiers of varying quality, so some will simply be better than others.

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.