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Line of Play is a mechanic which feels like my personal nemesis in XCOM2. It makes overwatch ambushes insanely more awkward to pull off, it makes missions feel samey with similar pod placement, and it does all this by breaking the one rule about concealment - the AI actually knows where you are, it just pretends that it doesn't.

Amidst its many, many overhauls, LW2 removed the LoP system. Can anyone tell me how to reproduce this? I'd like to make an isolated mod to remove just this mechanic, so that I can play War of the Chosen without it.

Right, time to answer my own question based on examining the LW2 mod files, and also based on some googling.

As I understand it, in LW2, Line of Play has never been removed entirely - alien pods are still placed on the map relative to the initial Line of Play. However, LW2 introduced considerably higher flexibility in where they could be placed, reducing the "samey-ness" that this mechanic brought in for vanilla.

Meanwhile, there is also upthrottling, which has been removed entirely. This is the behaviour where the pods would actually move based on your current location. Specifically, if your squad had closed in on the objective to about 50% distance, enemy pods would all begin to close in on the current Line of Play, regardless of whether you had broken concealment. LW2 kicks this behaviour out completely - and it is this behaviour which had AI pods acting omniscient about your location when it came to their movement. (More specifically, if I'm reading the mod files correctly, LW2 makes it so that upthrottling will only start once 9999 in-game turns have passed - so, effectively removed.)

LW2 also kicks out downthrottling for good measure, which is a mechanic by which the AI limits holds pods back if they'll activate but you're already engaged. (I'm interested to see that this is only disabled for 999 turns, rather than 9999 turns like upthrottling, but regardless it is effectively gone.)

So I think this means that for WotC, if I can find/make a mod which disables upthrottling, then I should be good to go. I can probably handle the samey-ness of the Line of Play initial deployment system, considering all the new stuff that WotC injects into the mix.

You got it. We also added in an alert system that overrides patrol zones based what's happening in the mission.

Did you ever find a mod that does this for WOTC?

Is there any LW2 documentation on how this was removed/replaced? I see there are some relevant lines in XComAI.ini and XComGameState_AIPlayerData.uc but I seem to recall Amineri mentioning that LOP/upthrottling code was all over the place.

Also, how was the alert/AIjobs system implemented?