koopakidshyguy

Only if you like seeing your own text twice, :tongue: In all seriousness, your input is appreciated, and we do hope to differentiate classes a bit more as time goes on, but custom abilities are difficult, and we're getting a lot more demands right now to get customization back up and running. On top of that, we don't have that many people actively working on the mod at the moment, (I'm probably gonna have to take a break from it soon too, a lot of projects I neglect every weekend I work on this, :\ ) so we'll do what we can, but the best way to go about getting any of these abilities implemented would be grabbing the SDK and seeing if you can get them running yourself. Aside from that, we'll be adding a balance discussion page in the steam mod thread, wouldn't mind seeing more nitty gritty input there, :D

@hunterkiller33 Mod's not dead, discussion's just been moved to the steam workshop page for convenience. Now that all aliens are in, we will be focusing on balance/streamlining aliens/bugfixing, so no need to fret.

Seems like the issue's with the customizable armors, they must've changed up the armor formatting somehow... yay. Personally, I've switched them back to the standard pawns in the research project files for my build to prevent future issues, but that's an admittedly destructive fix, as the customizable skins were really flipping awesome. Really starting to wish they could have just gone with the Enemy Within expansion model, crap like this just takes the wind out of my sails... Bad enough that faceless/gatekeeper still aren't cooperating, sucks more to have stuff outright break from underneath you, but c'est la vie, :\

Huh, that's weird, it worked properly in my old build. The soldier would die, but you'd get an Andromedon robot on your side. You tested it in-game and it didn't work? The only ability I know for sure is hard-coded to hostile is the civilian to faceless change, I've tested the others in tactical and they work fine.

You sure people wouldn't try cheesing that? Like "Oh no, my sectopod has 3 health left, I'm so scared... wait, I'll just have him shoot and then magically disappear," I know I'd do that, given the opportunity. Maybe if you give it a charge-up, it could work, you activate it the turn before and at the start of the next turn he evacs, so you can't use it as a mid-battle emergency move and keeps it lore friendly.

I think a short range, long cooldown "telejump" like the codex's for whenever the sectopod is stuck would be suitable, integrating a step up animation may be more trouble than it's worth.

The Gatekeeper I've tentatively set up will have its abilities tied to leveling up (Captain would be capable of Gateway, starting perk would be Consume, everything between would be a choice between psionic buffs and offense, along with some territory control). Essentially, the idea I'm working with for late game aliens (and will soon go back and change the andromedons to, as they are OP at the moment) is make them equivalent to the aliens at Major or Captain (they will have more abilities, but shouldn't get any stronger statwise), then everything else gives them a little edge . I personally would like squaddie aliens of all species at all levels to be equivalent to other squaddie human classes, but that's really not feasible considering the price and effort gone through to obtain aliens, so the best we can shoot for is that their later leveling is equivalent to the other classes. I've been able to access abilities on the level up screen by using the keyboard to select options, but this is definitely a temporary solution. Having the text be seen through aliens is easier said than done, and wouldn't really solve the problem as clicking on them would still just rotate the aliens, if I understand the set-up correctly. Perhaps an armor with an invisible model that could be switched to, but that sounds really janky now that I think about it.

The project description I have right now for Andromedons is rehabilitation and repair of an injured Andromedon. Not a perfect explanation, but it works for now. There could be an alternate corpse type of injured varieties of troops to be dropped after ending a mission with a mind-controlled/hacked/unconcious unit, perhaps combined with some kind of incapacitating secondary weapon, which would give a personal touch to it ("I remember the landed UFO I found you on... you bastard."). That being said, if people want Andromedons, they're probably just going to want an option to flat-out buy an Andromedon... or set them to free in the .ini, like I do, :wink: If the randomization irks you that badly, I understand, but I still think a generic mission type would serve you much better in the long run.

That's what cloning after the autopsy is for, if you want a specific alien, you buy a specific alien, it's a price you're willing to pay. The randomized mission would essentially fulfill an alternate purpose of encouraging unit diversity, which would increase the player's tactical options and replayability immensely. Plus, by having it be one specific mission that you reuse for all aliens, there would always just be one proving ground option to research the mission, greatly reducing clutter.

I think the idea is awesome, but only getting it once as a story thing seems like a lot of effort for a single mission, and that will only get worse the more aliens you add. Seems like you could make it a council thing or a fairly cheap proving grounds project (Advent Contacts), leading to a generic "Rogue Advent Rescue" mission that could choose from a pool with all (or at least the most appropriate for the game's current time) alien classes and could come up occasionally after either the blacksite or forge, making it a tactical tool to be considered alongside cloning options. Spokesman: Commander, recent reports from within the Advent network indicate that a high profile member of Advent's forces has gone rogue. This individual could prove to be an incredibly valuable asset for XCOM, but will need to be extracted quickly, as Advent forces are converging on their position, and it's only a matter of time before they are eliminated for their insubordination. (Incidentally, I'd be happy to spruce up the localization file if you'd like, all sorts of flavor text is brewing in my mind for this mod, :tongue:) It really comes down to what you want the mission to accomplish for the player. Making individual "story" missions dedicated to saving each alien type is going to hit diminishing returns really fast, and is going to get boring for players even faster. On the other hand, a trigger-able semi-randomized mission type providing an occasional opportunity to find Advent recruits without having to autopsy and pay through the nose for them would be an incredibly exciting prospect for a player, and would encourage players to recruit aliens they might not try out otherwise, and fits the modular nature of the game a lot better than a 12 part mini-campaign would. I think this mission is an awesome start, and with a little tweaking, it would basically be content-complete, so you won't have to get bogged down working on it (which would be a shame, because if this mod's going to see a wide userbase, it really needs to deliver on the promise of a new set of balanced, non-intrusive, polished classes, which this mission really isn't central to). It's awesome for world building, but I'd definitely say it's a matter of first things first.

It wouldn't be impossible, most faceless essentially function like that anyway, being spawned in as civilians and turning by using an ability. It'd have to be looked into, but I think they automatically lose their cover if they get too close to enemies, so I think it'd basically be set-up perfectly from the start, and would only need a little bit of tweaking to function as you expect it to. Essentially, they'd be perfectly concealed stealth units in sight range, but advent getting too close would reveal them, so you'd have to take care not to let them get revealed. There's a lot of melee focused aliens, so the faceless would have to be a stealth class in order to have any utility mid-late game. Worst case scenario you can just give him all the stealth ranger perks and multiple conceal charges to keep him useful. I'd love to make one, but it's definitely a lower priority than the Gatekeeper, as I bought XCOM 2 almost purely to play as the Andromedon and the Gatekeeper... halfway there, :D

We switched to PMs, I didn't mean to clutter things, just that some people wanted a heads up on progress, apologies for the mess.

That's fine, just for the other aliens it could get cumbersome, I'm picturing codexes/faceless/archons/sectoids really not getting that much out of having their own armor types. When I'm done, how do you want it? I can throw it all in a zip, but if you guys have stuff you're working on, I can highlight changes to make it easier to transfer in.

Oh, and why do you guys have separate armors for each class? You're gonna have to start purchasing advanced armors for every class, why not just have one alien class of armor that is shared between classes? It just seems like it's gonna add a lot of busywork down the road for not that much gain... or maybe I'm just lazy, XD

I'm cleaning up some stuff atm, but it actually ended up taking way less time than I expected, your muton was a great template to follow, I could probably churn these out one a week, if you guys'd like. (I'm the kind of person who would add an alien to their squad day one, balance be damned, so I understand if you guys aren't interested in quantity over quality and I can just do these for fun.) As far as balancing is concerned, my assumption is that anyone who has an Andromedon is late game with high level troops or spawned him in early, so I'm going to tie his stats to leveling so that he's not overtly OP late game or early game. Basically, I'm sticking to default Muton stats, but with some levels being dedicated to boosting his stats, so that his lieutenant rank is equivalent to being an actual Andromedon, (gonna do the same thing with the Gatekeeper when I get around to making it.)