XCOM EU Revert LW mission choice, and Terror mission change.

[Sylverlokk]

I was wondering if two changes to XCLW are possible.

The first involves reintroducing the choice option on abductions, where 3 options are presented and you choose one. I like the strategic choice involved in this option, though I think each option you choose should grant you -1 panic on taking it and -1 on completing it successfully, but each you did not choose you automatically gain 2 panic.

 

This is a net gain on panic overall but would be adjusted by the second change which would be to terror missions, where each difficulty would have an "expected" number of civilians saved. Each civilian above that number that you saved would grant you -2 panic for that country and -1 per neighboring continent countires panic. Each civilian that you failed to protect below the "expectation" would grant you +3 panic for that country and +2 per each other country on the continent. Possibly even an increasing penalty for the actual country for each below the expected threshold.

 

This would both add another difficulty modifier to the game, and make terror missions both even more scary and potentially game changing. The increased political cost might add more "push" to those missions.

 

I don't know how to mod, nor if these are ini file adjustments or actual code, but was wondering if someone else would know and if its easy would make this mod for me or tell me how too. Thanks in advance whether you can help or not.

[Zyxpsilon]

Don't despear... i might finally find some way to discover how this could be done. Don't know when exactly but eventually (with more luck) someone else might offer (us) the actual code hints necessary to achieve this (frankly) somehow small fix to an otherwise complex function customized for & by LW only.

 

Ideally though, all three "Locations" should be the same (or inside the exact same country) while maybe offering supplemental choices of rewards such as Elerium, Alloys and Meld -- possibly by replacing (the EU-EW defaults) Engineers & Scientists code-calls.

Edited December 21, 2015 by Zyxpsilon

[azxeus]

The problem with this is that in LW each abductor is a UFO you can shoot down and prevent the abduction, which I don't think is the case in vanilla, so not only is this more complicated than it seems but it makes creates other complications like do you send out multiple UFOs each abduction? what happens if you shoot one down but not the other? and possibly other things.

The way I look at it is that although LW made it so you don't HAVE to choose to not go on one of the abductions you can still choose not to and probably should sometimes.. you're not MEANT to go on every mission on LW, this is something a lot of people fail to grasp

 

 

 

The terror mission change is possible though, and might be a mod some people like but i'd just like to say the point is to not have terror missions occur at all, i don't think terror missions should decrease panic

Edited December 30, 2015 by azxeus

[Zyxpsilon]

Oh -- but the UFO-Abductor ship mechanic (both in terms of gameplay & code) should still remain exactly as is.

The only extra feature that would be added is a triple set of buttons (attached by various specific rewards along with the usual Credits) that players could simply choose from. Visually, the buttons could even have the very same "City locations" within a country to select that just represent the targeted area(s) for storyline purposes only.

[azxeus]

hm, so what you mean is, you want to be able to choose your rewards?

[Zyxpsilon]

That's precisely... and --JUST-- what i'd really want. :ninja:

Take a look at this very old combo-reference image from the old EU epoch...

 

 

http://s28.postimg.org/9e5ddpp1p/xcom_m4_choice.jpg

And now, imagine the buttons & three individual popups simply have the same City/Country headers while instead of Engineers, Scientists or New Recruit rewards... we would get;

1) 175§ + 40 Elerium -or- 2) 220§ + 25 Meld -or- 3) 140§ + 50 Alloys -or- ...whatever else!

Ideally, these sort of values would scale up&down according to the current gameplay conditions
...all neatly displayed in the usual "Green" Reward areas.

That's IT!

 

PS; Just contacted TrackTwo about that stuff... let's see what the future holds.

 

EDIT... later on this evening -- No luck! But i'm almost sure someone else reading this might pick up the slack -- someday! ;)

Edited December 31, 2015 by Zyxpsilon