DerBK

What i'd need to test is the effect of the Skulljack quest, not the one that flags Captains as a new enemy. I already saw during normal gameplay that they keep on spawning everywhere for longer. MECs actually don't appear until they can appear as followers (FL11). So it would have to be the quest related thing. Is there a way to turn quest status on/off with console commands?

That is a very relevant question, because i forgot to mention something important in my post. Usually i just use the debugger, generate a few maps, see what happens. Manually set spawnvalues to 99999 to see if they spawn at all. That kind of thing. I don't need to be very sciency with this for my mod as the variants are not individually as high impact as your Riftkeeper and Venator. Now regarding the current situation i noticed is that everything works fine when i run the debugger. Variants spawn. MECs are there. Everything within tolerances that i'd expect. This effect where Advent Captains suddenly spawn everytime happens only when starting or continuing an actual campaign in the XCOM2 game. For taht reason I spent a lot of time adjusting things and starting new campaigns today, trying to make sense of what happens. Thank god for the QuickStart mod or i would've lost my mind. Now that i think of it, the spawnrates being influenced by an enemy being new makes a lot of sense. You know how recently people started complaining about getting two Stunlancers in their reinforcement pod on the first mission? That's probably exactly the same thing. But i don't know for sure if this is actually something that influences the spawnrate, only anecdotal evidence. Someone who knows his way around the actual code would have to answer that. Same for the relation to the Skulljack quests. But we don't have those quests on mission 2 and 3, so this should be irrelevant for this particular problem in any case.

Okay, So here's the issue: Advent MECs don't seem to spawn anymore during the early game. Despite having a minimum leaderforcelevel of 6, they will not get chosen to lead a pod. They will only appear once they are available as followers at a later forcelevel. This happens since the update/DLC (not sure which one). Also in vanilla. The issue doesn't lie with the MEC, it is the Advent Captain that for some reason gets chosen as pod leader whenever possible. I know this because he also kicked out all of the Captain variants from my mod out. They simply don't spawn anymore if a vanilla Captain could spawn instead. The Spectrum mod also has reports of less variety in its comments, so they are probably just as affected. If i put the spawnweight of the Captain to zero, other units start spawning again. But even just giving him a weight of 0.1 will make him push everything out again. By now i pretty much looked at everything related to the missions.ini and the Characterstats.ini and am at my wits' end. Please help -.- What is causing this? Is it something buried deeper in the native code? Maybe something in a uc class where i didn't look? I reeeeaaaaally need to fix this.

-disregard this, wrong forum-

Haven't tested if it works, but a quick search found this interesting block of values: ResearchProject_TimeScalar[0]=1.0 ;Easy ResearchProject_TimeScalar[1]=1.0 ;Normal ResearchProject_TimeScalar[2]=1.0 ;Classic ResearchProject_TimeScalar[3]=1.0 ;Impossible BuildItemProject_TimeScalar[0]=1.0 ;Easy BuildItemProject_TimeScalar[1]=1.0 ;Normal BuildItemProject_TimeScalar[2]=1.0 ;Classic BuildItemProject_TimeScalar[3]=1.0 ;Impossible BuildFacilityProject_TimeScalar[0]=1.0 ;Easy BuildFacilityProject_TimeScalar[1]=1.0 ;Normal BuildFacilityProject_TimeScalar[2]=1.0 ;Classic BuildFacilityProject_TimeScalar[3]=1.0 ;Impossible UpgradeFacilityProject_TimeScalar[0]=1.0 ;Easy UpgradeFacilityProject_TimeScalar[1]=1.0 ;Normal UpgradeFacilityProject_TimeScalar[2]=1.0 ;Classic UpgradeFacilityProject_TimeScalar[3]=1.0 ;Impossible ClearRoomProject_TimeScalar[0]=1.0 ;Easy ClearRoomProject_TimeScalar[1]=1.0 ;Normal ClearRoomProject_TimeScalar[2]=1.0 ;Classic ClearRoomProject_TimeScalar[3]=3.0 ;Impossible ClearRoomProjectFirstRow_TimeScalar[0]=0.5 ;Easy ClearRoomProjectFirstRow_TimeScalar[1]=0.5 ;Normal ClearRoomProjectFirstRow_TimeScalar[2]=0.5 ;Classic ClearRoomProjectFirstRow_TimeScalar[3]=0.33 ;Impossible HealSoldierProject_TimeScalar[0]=1.5 ;Easy HealSoldierProject_TimeScalar[1]=1.5 ;Normal HealSoldierProject_TimeScalar[2]=1.5 ;Classic HealSoldierProject_TimeScalar[3]=2.5 ;Impossible Located in XComGameData.ini

Quote from the gamefiles (XGGameData) regarding encounter buckets: "The list of possible encounters and the conditions under which they are permissible. When evaluated, the first eligible encounter in this list will be selected." So no randomization it seems. The DLC could just add the ruler after mission caching happened. This would probably a pretty clean and compatible solution. Find the boss pod, roll a dice, decide whetether to replace it or not. Okay, so no randomization. Great. There goes my idea how to easily make some more interesting alien pods -.-

Eh, the bucket thing does help a bit. Thanks to it, the mission schedules don't need to be updated with additional entries. It also adds the functionality of "choose one of these pods at random at this spot" where you were only able to define one pod before. Just imagine if the DLC had to edit the mission schedules to fit the rulers in. That would've broken a lot more mods because it's higher in the hierarchy. But yes, it doesn't help as far as mod conflicts are concerned. And we have to treat the DLC as a mod, i guess.

You clearly did not get yet what i was saying. How about you shift back a gear or two and read again before making an even bigger ass of yourself.

Aliens are also not able to mix and match in their pod like Advent are, all aliens followers will always be the same. This shortcut in alien pod generation (that i believe was taken to make alien pods less chaotic) is responsible for also skipping over MaxCharactersPerGroup. It also makes pods in games with increased enemy squad size look terrible, because you always get a leader and four identical followers. :/ That restriction is a huge pain in my virtual butt. And since it's anchored in the native code, we can't even reach it. Annoying.

You say that as if you know that for sure. You are aware that any typos or unrecognized names in the SupportedFollower lists of units used to cause CTDs until the last patch fixed that? This is exactly the same situation.

Well, let's say i make a mod that wants to throw some stuff into the bucket for bosses. In the base game, this bucket has two entries: Bucket = Boss Pod + Filler Pod. In the DLC, this bucket has 5 entries: Bucket = Boss Pod + Filler Pod + 3 Rulers The DLC removes the base game line and adds its own instead just like any mod would using "+" and "-" If i make a mod that uses that line, i need to "-" it again. Both of them actually, because DLC users have a different one than non-DLC users and i don't want to keep either of them. Then i "+" my own line. And there it get's interesting: Assuming that with my mod i add two more things to the bucket for some reason, the line that i add has: Bucket = 1 Boss, 1 Filler, the 3 Rulers and the 2 Mod Things. Will i be able to use that with the base game? Or will the base game trip over those rulers because it doesn't know what to do with them? I don't know the answer to that yet. If the game's code is robust enough to ignore any entries it doesn't recognize, we are good. If not, we have a problem.

There was a fairly big change to the Mission.ini that broke a couple of mods, among them the ever popular IESS, IESS+ and More Pods. What happened is that Firaxis introduced the concept of "Buckets" into the file. At the point where Pod definitions are handed over to the Mission Schedules, some of those definitions have been put together into groups (=buckets) and this group is handed over instead. This has the advantage that now mods and dlc can throw things into these buckets and don't need to edit the mission schedules themselves. For example, in the base game, there are buckets labeld "LIST_BOSS" that each contain a Boss pods and their filler pod that gets called when the boss pod isn't availabe. The DLC adds the rulers into those buckets. So far, so good and it makes sense. However, it comes with a price: The mission schedules had to be changed to refer to those buckets. Mods that changed those mission schedules (like IESS...) need to be updated to the new format before they work again. Also, i suspect that anything that edits those buckets will need two versions - one that works without the DLC and one that works for people that have the DLC.

Well, if he got hacked/pranked, then someone was really thorough, considering he deleted his mods here, on the Workshop and also his Youtube videos.

"More than 15 abilities" was by him and apparently other mods depended on that.

Swinka didn't strike me as much of a drama queen. This really comes out of left field. Oh well. At least i didn't use one of his mods - he deleted those too and broke a lot of other peoples game. What a shitty thing to do, very disappointing.