Wrong tactical spawn location with large squads

[Karebennian]

Hi dear Long War Team!

First of all I want to express my sincere appreciation for all your work. You made XCOM THE definitive tactical experience in gaming and your mods for XCOM 2 breathe that legacy and keep entertaining me way beyond the capacity of the vanilla game.

I have got a small problem with large squad sizes though. I know that this is not a direct problem caused by the Long War Toolbox but as you state full compatability for up to 12 squadmembers maybe there is a way you can help me.

When loading up a tactical mission my squad often spawns right next to the mission target, thus making most of these missions a joke. Also in story missions like the black sites certain cutscenes either do not get triggered at all or in the wrong order, thus marring the experience significantly. I use a squad size of 9 as this allows me to use 1 soldier/mech of every class once I have unlocked Psy. Reducing this value to 8 clears up the problem.

Is there anything I can do to get this bug sorted out? I tried to play without your mods and honestly, I just cannot do it anymore

Regards,
Karebennian

[Amineri]

I've seen this bug pop up intermittently every so often.

The problem is in how the base-game looks for valid spawn points to place soldiers (plus possible VIP) into. Unfortunately it is hard-coded to only look at a 3x3 tile grid to see if it's possible to spawn all of the soldiers into. This means that anything that wants to spawn 10+ units has to do something special, or else all spawn points get marked invalid and the squad ends up by default at the 0 point of the map -- where the objective is.

The way that I worked around this in Toolbox is to spawn only the "core" part of the squad (defined by the ini MAX_SQUAD_SIZE) the usual way. After that any additional units are spawned in after the mission starts using logic similar to the "SpawnUnitFromAvenger" that is used to place units during the AvengerDefense mission. Unfortunately this still glitches out sometimes and the additional units spawn far from the squad, although I've not been able to get this to happen in a reproducible manner.