You still fly the Avenger around the globe to camp on spots and suck up resources or activate missions, but The Long War 2 introduces an additional layer of territory management. The rewards for these missions have been redesigned to affect the heavily reworked map layer. There are plenty of new mission types for these new soldiers to tackle, including prison break-outs and enemy base assaults. If they achieve a high degree of infiltration (represented by a percentage marker that ticks upwards with each day), they face weaker forces in that mission. Ordinary missions are preceded by an infiltration period that asks you to devote a squad to a location for a variable number of days. In The Long War 2 missions are more like leads that you can choose to spend time and resources to follow up. Your whole stance as resistance commander feels different to ordinary XCOM 2, which forces you into a reactive position with must-fight emergency missions. Consequently, losing agents isn't the body blow it can be in trad XCOM, and you have more room to experiment with ability and weapon combinations across your force. You can field up to ten in a mission, and you start with a large roster.
The mod forces you to break out of your habits and re-engage with the game again at the most basic level. For players that have mastered XCOM 2's story and power arcs, or now find them predictable, Long War 2 is an essential download.
