brainstorming: abilities for playable mec and viper?

[Lucubration]

Sure, I could take a look at the grenade issue. Figuring out grenades is something I need to look into, anyways. I'm working on tracking down a bug with the Infantry class at the moment, but once I have that resolved I'll start looking into the scripts related to the Viper's poison spit.

[davidlallen]

Looks like we need Chryssalid skills too, I accidentally added them today:

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3825375-playable-mecs-help-requested/page-3&do=findComment&comment=35102795

[Azworai]

Well, I assume they've already got the abilities the aliens already gave them. Lightning Reflexes or the one that negates overwatch entirely would be good abilities for them. Hardened Exoskeleton... possibly an ability that heals them a bit when they injure an enemy, like they take a bite from them. Regeneration, Reaper, Bladestorm.

[davidlallen]

Commander, I feel like something is missing from this combat squad, but I can't quite put my finger on it...

 

http://i.imgur.com/muqGPdn.png

[Azworai]

Commander, I feel like something is missing from this combat squad, but I can't quite put my finger on it...

 

 

Clearly you are lacking in mutons. ;)

[Lucubration]

Alright, I'm ready to get working on the Viper grenade tonight.

 

I tried using the Playable Advent mod as a starting point, but I ended up with several hundred various Advent in my roster; it was not really manageable.

 

Yesterday, I created an empty mod and starting trying to put a button into the Armory window so I could add me a Viper on demand... which is when I passed out at the keyboard from the all-nighter I pulled fixing that crash bug.

[davidlallen]

 

 

I tried using the Playable Advent mod as a starting point, but I ended up with several hundred various Advent in my roster; it was not really manageable.

 

Huwhat? Adding one alien to your roster requires a proving ground project and costs resources. It is possible there is some mod conflict bug. Can you try on a late game save with no other mods active? (You need the autopsy plus corpses to get the proving ground project).

 

It's pretty easy now to add the other aliens, but we seem to need 14 new skills for each one, which is already 42 skills needed. I don't think we have that many ideas yet. Any skills you can contribute will be great, but certainly the viper spit is the first one to try for.

[Lucubration]

 

I tried using the Playable Advent mod as a starting point, but I ended up with several hundred various Advent in my roster; it was not really manageable.

 

Huwhat? Adding one alien to your roster requires a proving ground project and costs resources. It is possible there is some mod conflict bug. Can you try on a late game save with no other mods active? (You need the autopsy plus corpses to get the proving ground project).

 

It's pretty easy now to add the other aliens, but we seem to need 14 new skills for each one, which is already 42 skills needed. I don't think we have that many ideas yet. Any skills you can contribute will be great, but certainly the viper spit is the first one to try for.

 

 

Err, yeah, that was with the published version of the mod that I tried over the weekend. I had that issue where it didn't register that it had already added them to the roster, so while I was in a mission saving and loading a few dozen times to test stuff out... yeah.

[PepprmintButler]

Hey, glad to see this getting traction.

 

I had sent a pretty lenghty PM to sgtcal10 right after the initial release, on Feb24, about what some ideas for the MEC class. It might as well be out there for you guys to see and discuss, so I'll just copypasta the whole thing below - wall of text warning.

 

--

I've been brainstorming a bit about what an interesting class for MEC would look like

With just basic ini edits I came up with this :

http://i.imgur.com/KxUzoxU.jpg

The idea is either go essentially Grenadier (right side), which meshes fairly well with the base micro missiles, or very tanky (left side) with cool defensive abilities like Shieldwall (which I would edit to give the mech himself some additional defense too, including possibly temporary explosive damage immunity as two units on top of each other is usually a guaranteed grenade from opponents who have one), Energy Shield, and for a bit more offensive touch, the Sectopod's short range AoE zap thingie (which is a bit funky animation-wise as it stands but I haven't looked into it much). Saturation fire would probably be better swapped for something more defense-y, like some regeneration (Faceless have a skill like that ready for salvaging) to counter the inevitable damage you'll take out of cover.

One balancing factor would be to set the base number of utility slots to zero, which limits options a bit and also avoids animation issues (throwing animation breaks stuff). At Sergeant, Launch Grenade gives a dedicated grenade slot (which can be upgraded with the next 2 tiers) and I would like to put that against the option of a dedicated ammo slot,as that would be fairly safe in terms of breaking stuff (although I do not know how to implement it).

As for armor, I think dedicated options would be best as giving them predator/powered/etc seems weird and also introduces utility slots. I think having dedicated "chassis" levels that can be unlocked through proving grounds parallel to soldier armor technology would be best. (I don't know if or how that can be done in the SDK). Possibly giving more armor points than additional HP points, as that would be more consistent with the "no cover" nature of MECs. 2 tiers of armor with heavy/powered weapons but with less defense (as neither would have utility slots as a balancing factor) would also be nice. I don't think light armor would be necessary or flavorful.

It would probably be fairly easy to also add a PG project that unlocks the advanced MEC's weapon as an upgrade.

It seems them activating or picking up stuff bugs things out, so disabling that would probably be a good idea.

Another thing that will eventually need looking into is building in something that prevents MECs from bleeding out, and if you want to go into detail replace stunned/unconscious with Shutdown. Possibly make it impossible to pick unconscious/dead MECs up too...

Then there's the issue of wounds and healing. There probably should be a different way to manage that for robotics as having them wounded is just inconsistent (although needing repairs is reasonable). With the no cover thing I think they'd spend an unreasonable amount of time in the shop. One thought I had is, I play with the "tis but a scratch" mod that makes it so that soldiers only get wounded if their health dips below their base health value, not including health from armor. So one could use that and tune the ratio of base health vs health from armor to minimize wounds and possibly prevent them entirely, especially if you make dedicated versions of the armors for the MEC.

 

--

(added later )

Answering myself real quick here - it seems there could be a not too complicated way to make an ammo-only slot available.

https://www.reddit.com/r/xcom2mods/comments/4789nh/mod_request_armor_slot_for_ammo/

Edited March 3, 2016 by PepprmintButler

[Lucubration]

I wanted to add an ammo pocket to my Infantry as well and spent a while looking into it. In the final analysis, something that seems so simple actually has some really serious ramifications:

• It uses a deprecated type of item that's actually called 'eItem_Ammo' or somesuch. That item type isn't in use at all anymore, and ammo are just considered one more type of eItem_Utility.
• If we changed ammo back into eItem_Ammo to make use of the special slot, no one else would be able to equip ammo.
• If we didn't change the ammo type and instead changed how the ammo pocket was implemented, we'd also have to change the loadout UI, probably making it incompatible with other mods that affected the loadout screen.
• If we changed the code related to unit inventory to enable the use of the ammo pocket, we'd be overriding the base XComGameState_Unit (I think that was it), which is one of the core gamestate classes for the game. While we could do this, only one mod ever can do it for a user, which means we'd drastically reduce our compatibility.

In other words, it'd be extremely invasive just to do something "simple" like add an ammo pocket. I'm not really happy at all with the way they implemented this stuff at Firaxis.

 

I feel like we're going to wait for someone to create a framework for an extensible inventory system (UI and gamestate overrides) that multiple other mods can use at the same time without being in conflict before we should attempt stuff like that.

 

On the same note, I'm not sure how simple it would be to remove the armor slot for the MEC without drastic and invasive changes, etc. I admit that this part I haven't looked into, but it seems pretty fundamental for units.

 

I like the notion of going with emphasizing micro-missiles and other heavy ordnance with one tree. Putting in some Grenadier abilities would be fine for a start, and I think we can improve it from there as we build a better idea of how we want the MEC to play.

 

I had some really serious issues with creating a tanky tree for the Infantry class. It's not that it's technically hard, but that the role isn't very rewarding. You get shot at, you go to the medbay (repair bay, whatever) for a while, and if you had taken some other class instead you would've killed or disabled the enemy and taken them down without taking damage in the first place. Nothing wrong with putting some strong survival tools in there, and the MEC should definitely have some, but the game as a whole isn't tuned for a large, rotating roster like Long War was so having units take damage pretty much just means you screwed up.

 

If we're going to make tanki-ness, we're either going to want to make cooldowns and stacking effects (defense and armor) that will completely eliminate the MEC taking damage in the first place, or a way to make them getting attacked/damage be punishing for the attacker while also reducing the ramifications of putting them into sickbay after it happens.