I am running out of ideas with this issue that causes Advent Captains to bully MECs out of spawning...

[DerBK]

Okay,

 

So here's the issue:

Advent MECs don't seem to spawn anymore during the early game. Despite having a minimum leaderforcelevel of 6, they will not get chosen to lead a pod. They will only appear once they are available as followers at a later forcelevel.

This happens since the update/DLC (not sure which one). Also in vanilla.

 

The issue doesn't lie with the MEC, it is the Advent Captain that for some reason gets chosen as pod leader whenever possible. I know this because he also kicked out all of the Captain variants from my mod out. They simply don't spawn anymore if a vanilla Captain could spawn instead. The Spectrum mod also has reports of less variety in its comments, so they are probably just as affected.

 

If i put the spawnweight of the Captain to zero, other units start spawning again. But even just giving him a weight of 0.1 will make him push everything out again.

 

 

By now i pretty much looked at everything related to the missions.ini and the Characterstats.ini and am at my wits' end. Please help -.-

 

What is causing this? Is it something buried deeper in the native code? Maybe something in a uc class where i didn't look?

 

 

 

I reeeeaaaaally need to fix this.

Edited May 21, 2016 by DerBK

[LeaderEnemyBoss]

How do you test the spawning behavior? I noticed some interesting quirks of the spawning system that can skew your testing. For example: if a new enemy is eligible to spawn, the game raises the spawn weight of this enemy astronomically. I noticed this when i developed my riftkeeper and Venator mods, two enemies that are balanced around showing up "sometimes" but not in every mission. I tested spawn behavior in an ongoing test campaign (spawned many missions via cheat command and have a screenlistener in place that reads the missions pod composition) and it would almost always appear, even with a spawnweight of 1. After I saw it once, spawn behavior was as expected (that is almost no showups with spawnweights now on 1 ^^). For this reason I would advice against using TQL for testing spawnrates, since it doesnt necessarily represent ingame spawning behavior.

 

EDIT: Also if the main story objective "skulljack a captain" is active, this may influence spawnrates

Edited May 21, 2016 by LeaderEnemyBoss

[DerBK]

How do you test the spawning behavior?

 

That is a very relevant question, because i forgot to mention something important in my post.

 

Usually i just use the debugger, generate a few maps, see what happens. Manually set spawnvalues to 99999 to see if they spawn at all. That kind of thing. I don't need to be very sciency with this for my mod as the variants are not individually as high impact as your Riftkeeper and Venator.

 

Now regarding the current situation i noticed is that everything works fine when i run the debugger. Variants spawn. MECs are there. Everything within tolerances that i'd expect.

This effect where Advent Captains suddenly spawn everytime happens only when starting or continuing an actual campaign in the XCOM2 game. For taht reason I spent a lot of time adjusting things and starting new campaigns today, trying to make sense of what happens. Thank god for the QuickStart mod or i would've lost my mind.

 

Now that i think of it, the spawnrates being influenced by an enemy being new makes a lot of sense. You know how recently people started complaining about getting two Stunlancers in their reinforcement pod on the first mission? That's probably exactly the same thing.

 

But i don't know for sure if this is actually something that influences the spawnrate, only anecdotal evidence. Someone who knows his way around the actual code would have to answer that. Same for the relation to the Skulljack quests. But we don't have those quests on mission 2 and 3, so this should be irrelevant for this particular problem in any case.

Edited May 21, 2016 by DerBK

[LeaderEnemyBoss]

Well if my theory is correct, this would be how to prove it: get a shadowchamber (givefacility shadowchamber 3) to see whether game recognizes that you have seen the enemy (officer in this case). spawn a mission (e.g. spawnmission missionsource_guerillaop reward_supplies on strategy map), enter the mission. Use "powerup" to comb the mission map and see al the enemies. Use "endbattle" to end the mission. Spawn a new mission, advent officers should no be less "pushy" with their spawning, especially if you set their leaderweight to something like 1.

[DerBK]

What i'd need to test is the effect of the Skulljack quest, not the one that flags Captains as a new enemy.

 

I already saw during normal gameplay that they keep on spawning everywhere for longer. MECs actually don't appear until they can appear as followers (FL11). So it would have to be the quest related thing.

 

Is there a way to turn quest status on/off with console commands?

[LeaderEnemyBoss]

What i'd need to test is the effect of the Skulljack quest, not the one that flags Captains as a new enemy.

 

I already saw during normal gameplay that they keep on spawning everywhere for longer. MECs actually don't appear until they can appear as followers (FL11). So it would have to be the quest related thing.

 

Is there a way to turn quest status on/off with console commands?

 

There is StartObjective and ForceCompleteObjective, i dont really know how to use them. Probably something like "StartObjective T1_M2_HackACaptain true" and "ForceCompleteObjective T1_M2_HackACaptain". PrintActiveObjectives may also be useful.

 

EDIT: Maybe its also T1_M2_S3_SKULLJACKCaptain

Edited May 22, 2016 by LeaderEnemyBoss