playable advent mod: details, feedback

[koopakidshyguy]

Been following this mod for a while, love it a lot, but I find the acquisition method of building them a little lame, and I'm planning on adding the alien classes to my recruitment pool. Is this something you guys plan on doing yourselves down the road, i.e. should I even bother?

 

Also, Sectopods, Gatekeepers, and Andromedons are known for instantly losing concealment in skirmish mode due to their tendency to damage terrain while moving, is this something you plan on retaining or removing? My vote is for retaining, having them be dedicated assault troops as opposed to stealth operatives makes sense in my opinion, and removing the ability to destroy terrain with them would greatly lower their tactical flexibility/Kool-Aid man potential, but either way it'd probably be a good thing to hash out in advance.

 

One last thing is what balance will you all be shooting for as you go on? I imagine an ideal balance being rookie aliens being equal to rookie soldiers, and picking up their abilities as time goes on, with an OP late game Gatekeeper being essentially equal to an OP late game sniper. Essentially, "constructing" the aliens would actually produce aliens at a high enough level to have all their default stats/abilities unlocked, whereas hiring them or finding them via other means would provide rookies that would have to be nurtured to their full potential. Just feels like as is, you're waiting through an awfully long amount of game and putting a lot of resources in just to build what feel like alien rookies in the proving grounds, all of whom start off being dangerously close to being obsolete.

 

That being said, I am aware that a lot of the current ability set-ups are more or less workarounds, like the viper being equipped with poison grenades for her spit, etc., so I certainly understand and respect a bottom-up approach to getting this working and worrying about balance later. Also, sorry for the wall of text, it's just that I've been literally waiting for something like this since Enemy Unknown first came out, and seeing it come to life is tremendously exciting, every time I see a new alien type in the screenshots, it literally makes my day, and if you're looking for extra hands to add new classes, I'd be more than happy to throw a bit of my time your way.

Edited March 14, 2016 by koopakidshyguy

[davidlallen]

Thanks for the feedback. There are two contradictory goals here. On the one hand, playing with aliens in your squad is cool and the "lore" justification doesn't matter! On the other hand, having a good mechanism and lore justification is nice too.

 

For MECs, I think it is perfectly reasonable for a mechanical genius to be able to build stuff like this from recovered corpses. Do you think the MEC construction part is lame too, and if so what can we do differently?

 

For vipers, they show up as highly regenerative in all three games (EU, EW, XCOM2) so it isn't *that* unreasonable that a biological genius could trigger some leftover cells to regenerate. That kind of works for chryssalid eggs too. Does this seem lame?

 

For the others, we just started putting them in as mind controlled or brainwashed, just because it is cool, not because the lore is any good.

 

What did you mean by putting them in your soldier pool? Having aliens show up as random recruits doesn't seem any more "lore friendly" to me.

 

I was thinking of trying to mod the council missions which give rewards of a soldier, so that some of the soldiers could be alien soldiers. Or, so that the rescue mission itself *rescues* a muton or some other alien who advent considers a rebel sympathizer. Then after the mission that alien would be in your armory. Modding missions is a lot more complicated, and there is still a random aspect to consider. I think most people are ok with the quest reward randomly being a scientist or an engineer or a new soldier of a random class. But, if somebody is using the mod, and they want to play a muton in particular, then this random aspect would be frustrating.

 

(BTW, the quest reward is not actually random, you can see from reading the code: if you are low on engineers you get an engineer, low on scientsts you get a scientist, the soldier class you get is always the one you have the least of.)

 

Is there a way we can resolve these conflicting requirements, given the random nature of mission assignments? If there is something that would be more fun for everybody, and we can work out a way to mod it, that will make the mod better.

[hunterkiller33]

Is this build currently live? Or is this a heads up that the mod is getting an update?

[PepprmintButler]

Trying out the new workshop release right now.

 

first couple things :

- MEC weapon upgrade slot is unusable (all the stuff I have in stores is greyed out)

- Viper texture is all black

- Viper starting ability is bugged out

[davidlallen]

@ Peppermint, Hm. Did you load a save which did not have the old mod, and try the trick of deleting the My Documents/...XComGame/*.ini files?

 

Can anybody else (apart from the mod developers) confirm it is working for them?

 

@ hunterkiller, yes, the new version is released on steam. Probably it will be on nexus tomorrow.

Edited March 14, 2016 by davidlallen

[PepprmintButler]

I'm not 100% on having done a clean reinstall on this. I'll just go and clean it up to see if that persists.

[koopakidshyguy]

@davidlallen No need to take my usage of the word "lame" personally, it's just what came to mind in it's current iteration, but you're right, it's not entirely fair. Building MECs and Sectopods makes complete sense lorewise, and the cloning angle isn't necessarily wrong. However, lorewise, the idea of individualistic aliens openly coming to rebel against the Ethereals is just a stronger narrative for me personally than "we cloned you, serve us". If I wanted a slave race of aliens or robots, I'd just stick with mind control and hacking, but this mod provides a unique opportunity to really flesh out the lore of XCOM, breaking down the supposed solidarity of the Exalt Coalition.

 

That's not to say the option to build the aliens shouldn't exist, that's fine, people wanna play as mutons, let them build mutons, no skin off my back, just that there should be alternative methods of acquisition that force people out of their comfort zones to take aliens they might not have taken otherwise, and all acquisition methods should (eventually) be geared towards having useful squad members at all points in the campaign. The quest reward option you brought up would be a fairly low effort option for this, and I support it fully, the recruit set-up would have basically been an earlier access version of this, only with a greatly increased rarity. As for justifying it lore-wise, an alternate set of soldier backgrounds could be drafted for them down the line, a viper recruit joining XCOM out of a hatred for a class structure weighted against them hardly seems lore breaking to me, nor an opportunistic Muton changing sides to back what he worries might be a winning horse, a malfunctioning MEC that's had its attack parameters reversed due to severe damage in the field, these stories all practically write themselves.

 

That being said, a low level recruit acquisition would only make sense if the aliens were balanced to be equal to rookies at the first rank, which they aren't and probably never will be, or if alien recruits were made more expensive/rare, the second option being what I would have gone with. In my mind, the mod functions best not with full alien squads, but with occasional alien individuals joining and providing each playthrough of the game with unique tactical combinations found on the fly by desperate commanders working with what is available to them. Not saying that's how everyone has to play, of course, just saying that's how I plan to play.

Edited March 14, 2016 by koopakidshyguy

[davidlallen]

For the balance, I definitely agree that we need to make sure the new classes are balanced at all reasonable points in the campaign. If we added to the mod so that an alien race could randomly show up from rescue missions, it wouldn't be till after you had encountered that race on missions. By the time a random mission came up after that, it would be about the same time you can normally buy them in the mod (which requires two corpses if you aren't playing in "FREE_ALIEN" mode).

 

So, the balance challenge is the same with rescue rewards and with building. Suppose you have a rookie alien when most of your soldiers are sergeants. The aliens should level up pretty quickly since the XP requirement for the first few levels is easy. I am curious about people's feedback, especially for the viper and mec: are they under or over powered when you first get them? How about near the end game? The mec's new weapon tier should help for that. We haven't done too much with the muton or berserker yet, and the chryssalid will be a balance challenge.

 

I agree that an all-alien squad doesn't make much sense lorewise. But, it is helpful to find and fix bugs, like how vipers couldn't hack before, or to know that these aliens can't rescue civilians in retribution missions. (I'm not sure if that is good or bad yet.)

 

Please do let me know if you find them over/under powered at the mid/end game.

[koopakidshyguy]

I can confirm Berserker movement breaks concealment, should consider working on some way to inform players of this when they first unlock so they don't find out by accident mid-ironman, that way you could reuse this method for all the other self-revealing alien types. Also, at the point that the berserker becomes buyable, there are very few opportunities to utilize them well. I tried cliff ambush tactics during a train raid (bearing in mind he had to stand at spawn while the squad got in position, like he was on timeout or something), and after he got a lucky punch in on a MEC (an insultingly low percentage to hit, mind you), he had a bunch of damage dumped into him from said MEC and a pair of troopers and was put in medbay for a month. Perhaps a lowered healing time for them would make sense, along with unlockable regen perks later on, because as is, there's no way to get the poor guy to level up into usefulness. I mean, it was a really fun mission, had him headbutting into enemy cover and running away to expose high priority targets to sniper fire, it was f***ing sweet, just wish his lack of armor and exposure from standing didn't put him at so much risk.

Edited March 14, 2016 by koopakidshyguy

[PepprmintButler]

quick update : started a new game with wiped inis and new mod release, still getting the same 3 issues as mentioned above. Is that just me ?