brainstorming: abilities for playable mec and viper?

[davidlallen]

OK Commander, we're headed off to the broadcast tower. Do you want us to pick you up anything?

(notice the missile launcher now on the mec's back)

 

http://i.imgur.com/TvcJ0bI.png

[davidlallen]

Regarding mec abilities, we could view it kind of like a mimic beacon, or a standard MMO tank class. It can't take cover anyway, so let it run down the middle of the street and get shot up a lot. In order for that to work, it can't spend a lot of time in the repair bay afterwards. Maybe a passive ability like the stasis vest (auto-regenerate 2 hp / turn up to 8 max) would help. I was also thinking of *armor* healing. That is, after a shredding attack, the armor itself would grow back.

 

Is there any way that an individual class can get faster healing time in the strategy layer? EW had the regeneration meld ability.

 

I've been trying to get the secondary weapons working, and I got the mec launcher / micromissile to display finally. Still working out the viper poison spit; it kind of works, but as a standard grenade, anybody can equip it, which is undesirable.

[Azworai]

Shield pips don't incur medbay time, increasing the amount of raw armor the MEC has also reduces this. Increasing it's 'defense' or dodge statistics also increase the effective HP of the MEC. The MEC cannot take cover, so giving it inherent defense is a fair tradeoff as well. As also mentioned increasing the armor granted HP rather than the base health of the MEC also impacts medbay time. Regenerating in-combat I don't believe actually impacts recovery time after battle.

 

I like the idea of treating the MEC as a bullet-sponge as a role. The idea would be, "The MEC will soak the damage for the other soldiers, so you can run a somewhat more fragile team than you otherwise would, supporting either a team of glass cannons, or helping rookies/squaddies rank up to help support that 'rotating' balance like Long War's balance.

[sgtcal10]

I second this, i'll work on the abilities ready for the next update

[Lucubration]

Is there any way that an individual class can get faster healing time in the strategy layer? EW had the regeneration meld ability.

I've been looking at this, myself. The short answer is yes, although not quite as cleanly as I'd like.

 

The longer answer:

 

At the end of the mission, when a soldier is being transition back to the strategic game, the engine puts their lowest health value at any point during the mission as their current health. Based on the percentage of their total health, some RNG happens and they are given a wound of appropriate severity, which is then displayed to us when the skyranger lands and the troops file out. We can hook in and change that "lowest health" value before it does the RNG, but after that we're up to the mercy of whether it considers even 1 health damage to be "lightly wounded" with 7 days healing or "wounded" with 13 days healing. All of it happens inside if some game rules class we don't really want to mess with.

 

I still need to confirm whether or not there are any hooks we can use to adjust the wound severity after it is displayed but before the post-mission landing screen is shown. It may be possible for us to do something there.

 

During the game rules stuff where it chooses the wound severity, the game also creates a project at the HQ (similar to a proving grounds or research project) and calls it the soldier healing project. There is one associated with each wounded soldier. We could go in there at any point during the strategic game and modify the project progress to speed up their healing. If we can do this before they're even shown the soldiers coming out of the Skyranger, that would be ideal, but I think in any case we should able to get to it before they're able to view the actual "Wounded (X days)" information.

 

I'm going to try doing this exact thing with my Infantry mod, probably tonight, and once I understand it better we'll be able to go over our options for putting it into PA.

Edited March 4, 2016 by Lucubration

[davidlallen]

Thanks for the info.

 

Regarding the soldier healing project, I was considering that mecs could be repaired instantly by spending supplies. I am not sure exactly what the UI for this would be. Something like 10 supplies to insta-heal any mec? Or maybe using up a mec corpse, or both.

 

There are several mods which affect healing rates. Is there something in those which can be usefully reverse-engineered?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=619938300&searchtext=heal

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=623051340&searchtext=heal

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=622021770&searchtext=heal

[Lucubration]

Hmm... I don't know that it's necessary. We're not going to be doing the same thing as those mods, exactly. Far as I can tell, two of them are just .ini edits that blanket change the wound table for all of your soldiers, and the other overrides a couple of core classes which we're not going to do for compatibility reasons.

 

If you're talking about doing like a 1-day PG project for healing a MEC (or anything like that), that's going to be very easy.

 

Search for OnProjectFinished in Firaxis' source code. You should find how the cheat manager lets you heal all of your wounded soldiers instantly with a console command.

 

Use that same method, but pick only a single wounded MEC from your barracks to heal instead of doing it to everyone.

 

Make it a button on a wounded MEC's armory screen, maybe?

Edited March 4, 2016 by Lucubration

[davidlallen]

I guess the hardest part is deciding where to put the button, so that people will find it. Maybe one proving ground project, which heals one random injured mec, and the button doesn't appear if all the mecs are at full strength? This works, unless the user has two damaged mecs and only wants to heal one. I wonder how many people would never find the extra project.

[sgtcal10]

update out now, thanks again david, also what would you like me to work on, it seems like your doing everything!

[sgtcal10]

 

 

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.

 

damn, im gonna credit you right now, i love this class tree idea, do you have any others?