Long War - Buff Interceptors

[crimsonshad0w]

Greetings fellas.

I'll preface this complaint with the fact that I respect and am ecstatic that the modders have invested so much time in this mod. It transforms the game into a completely new beast; one that is challenging and very entertaining. Although I enjoy the rest of the mod, I have a singular problem--the fact that the Inteceptors in my opinion are just too weak in the beginning. I've searched, and tried to (unsuccessfully) hex edit/modify the stats on the interceptors. As i've said before this is the one major facet that makes, for me, the mod unenjoyable.

 

The fact that it requires 5 inteceptors (and sometimes this is not enough) with starting weapons to down a large scout is ridiculous. This is only one month into the game. I've done my best spending hours researching where the stats are for modifying the interceptors. There is a posting that details the location, but even after changing the hex location to the appropriate number to buff them to a level I find reasonable, it fails to work. If anyone can help me with this, or point me to any working source that explains how to change this it would be greatly appreciated.

 

TLDR; Interceptors suck too badly, is there a way to buff then that is not overly difficult?

 

Thanks for reading, and happy hunting/playing.

[Amineri]

Inteceptor, UFO and ship weapon stats are all set (and in Long War upgraded during the campaign) in the XComStrategyGame.upk. So, that means hex edits. These would be the simplest of the hex edits, changing one value for another (at the simplest level).

 

However, before you go off changing things I'd humbly recommend you check out the Long War Strategy subforum. There have been a few posts about how to handle the interception game, and what you should expect and not expect to accomplish (hint -- shooting down every UFO is not part of design).

[Krazyguy75]

Yeah, as I said in the LW discussion thread a while back, sometimes in LW "...it is necessary to avoid taking missions, or to give up on ones that are going sour. In EU, this would mean you are already past the losing point. In Long War, it just means you lost the battle, but need to continue with the war. Long War features losses, but it also eases up on the lose conditions, and overall makes the strategy layer more patient."

Edited June 4, 2014 by Krazyguy75

[crimsonshad0w]

Thank you for your responses :blush:

 

I understand that not every interceptor is supposed to be shot down; im completely okay with this. I just find it slightly out of wack that 5 interceptors cannot down a medium scout. Ive tried about 20 reloads in a row, and all 20 times they failed to shoot down it. lol. Towards the end of this session I did not even try to save the birds, just let them shoot until they died or ran out of the 9.5 second timer.

 

In this particular scenario, there is two large scouts up. I understand that I cannot kill both and as stated before I'm cool with this. However not being able to even down ONE with 5 interceptors 20 times in a row, in my humble opinion, is not the best design. It is possible that I managed to strike hard on the unlucky end of the RNG spectrum, but in order to save my self some time and annoyance, i'd like to chance change the hit chance on avalanche or even stringray missiles to be higher--40% baseline to say 55% or 60%.

 

Anyway I thought I had located the appropriate hex location using UE Explorer. I went to the location that I had identified and changed the hex value from 40% to 60% for testing (3C). After saving this ( I used notepad ++ with a hex plugin ) the UE explorer did not recognize the change, nor did the game. So obviously I did not do something right. This is the help I am after; I appreciate each persons opinion, but to make the game more entertaining for me I'd like to affect this change. I'm not asking to be spoon fed, but looking for someone more experienced, to give me any ideas on why it did not work. Thank you for reading, and I'll stop typing as this is threatening to become a giant wall of text, if it isn't already.

 

Edit: spelling.

Edited June 6, 2014 by crimsonshad0w

[johnnylump]

Hey, let's not discourage someone actually willing to crack open a upk for some work! :)

 

To change the accuracy of the Avalanche missile, (ship weapon 3), you need to make changes to two functions:

 

XGItemTree.BuildShipWeapons

and

XGItemTree.UpdateShips

 

Probably you really only need to do the second one, but safer to do both.

 

In BuildShipWeapons the line

BuildShipWeapon(3, 3, 100, 2.0, 340, 0, 40);

should become

BuildShipWeapon(3, 3, 100, 2.0, 340, 0, 60);

 

And in Updateships, the line

 

BuildShipWeapon(3, 3, 100, 2.0, 340, 0, 40 + ((ENGINEERING().IsFoundryTechResearched(31)) ? 10 : 0));

 

should become

 

BuildShipWeapon(3, 3, 100, 2.0, 340, 0, 60 + ((ENGINEERING().IsFoundryTechResearched(31)) ? 10 : 0));

 

 

A few warnings

 

* You will eventually be able to get Avalanche accuracy to 110% with a foundry tech plus a 10-kill pilot.

 

* Long War doesn't have a large scout UFO. It has two different types of medium-sized UFOs, the raider and the much tougher destroyer. They look the same, and you can only ID them after you've shot one down, or you figure out their mission. A concerted effort with default Avalanches has a chance to bring down the raider, and these changes will make that easier. Avalanches will probably never kill a destroyer, even with an accuracy buff -- you need armor piercing weapons like the Stingray (weapon 2) or Phoenix Cannon (weapon 1) to have a chance.

 

It sounds like you were able to derive the hex for the change, so I won't detail it here, but if you run into trouble with the above changes, just post here.