I wonder... how malleable the AWCpack ini is?

[Lyzak]

The AWC is honestly one of my favorite parts of soldier creation. I just love the way that soldiers can turn into truly unique fighting machines with a little randomness and some creative thinking. Each time I class a soldier, the first thing I do is look at their AWC rolls - all of 'em; I play with the whole AWC tree revealed.

Still, I think I'm gonna abandon my current save, out of a combination of feeling like I got inexcusably behind in research, and frustration with bugs. While I'm taking some time off, though, I have this fun little project I'm gonna work on involving overhauling the AWCpack ini. No, this isn't any kind of "I can do it better" crusade; I'm going to make it significantly stronger, and I make no claims that this will make the game more 'fair' in any way. It'll just be for fun.

The first thing I'm gonna experiment with is if the game doesn't explode when I try to allow soldiers to take more than 3 offensive or defensive perks. I'm currently pondering adding just a fourth tier. If it doesn't choke on that, I'll be repositioning all the perks, removing a few of them that I just can't tolerate showing up on my soldiers, and tuning down the training times a lot. Probably also going to see if I can enable the AWC for SPARK; I love these big ole' mechs but the poor things just have very little customization outside their main tree. No PCS, no weapon mods, no utility items, no AWC, no Hidden Potential... Maybe enabling their AWC will spice things up a bit.

Again, I want to clarify: I in no way think this will be "more balanced." Honestly, I expect it to be quite broken. But it's currently very hard to keep my attention on this game between how poorly it runs on my system, and how furiously I have to fight bug after bug after bug to get to anything fun. This is going to be the sort of change that "super-soldier" players enjoy, not hardcore players.

Lemme know if this catches your interest! Maybe I'll post my changes. Or if the whole thing goes kaput, you all get a chronicle of my adventures in INI editing.

[Dlareh]

Cool story bro

[Lyzak]

I appreciate the positive, non-sarcastic feedback.

[Zyxpsilon]

This -- http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =897239708 -- you really gotta try!

It does expose the essential mechanics involved quite clearly.. permits a few tricky (cheaty.. but who really cares anymore!) ReSpec acrobatics with whatever setup you'd prefer to "get" or "test with".. and of course, allows various other external INI file edits to fine-tune the entire AWC dynamics for any Classes.

Highly recommended for anyone willing to do the leg-work as you seem to be ready for such a wild ride with precision or even, alternate custom results!

[Lyzak]

Hmm. "A Better AWC" does sound interesting but it's not quite what I'm trying to do. ABAWC gives you tools to fight the random skill rolls and basically - given enough supplies - hand-craft your soldiers. I think that part of the fun is in the randomness (so long as the random doesn't result in shit skills no one would want), it forces you to try and think of unique ways to incorporate those new tactics into your fighting style.

In either case, I've been mucking about with the AWC INIs and I've been met with mixed success. Mostly, it actually all seems to work just fine: soldiers (if forced to reroll their AWC rolls) generate 4 offensive and defensive abilities as 'designed,' and opening the AWC offers the reduced training times that I input. Woohoo!

However, the other half of this experiment was to attempt to give SPARK access to AWC abilities, and that didn't work quite as anticipated.

Technically, SPARK generates an AWC tree. So that, in and of itself, works! But there's no option to TRAIN in the AWC, and I can't seem to 'get rid of' SPARK's pistol tree.

To give SPARK an AWC tree, I commented out two lines of code. The first was in XComLW_AWCPack.ini, at the very bottom there's a line:

Code: Select all

+ClassCannotGetAWCTraining="Spark"

The second of which was in XComClassData.ini under the SPARK class:

Code: Select all

bAllowAWCAbilities=0

I suspect that "bAllowAWCAbilities" is actually a flag, not an integer value, as none of the other default classes even had the line of code. So I commented it out, as well.

As for the pistol perks, I attempted to force the tree to not generate by adding ability restrictions. The AWCPack INI has a long block of restrictions that basically say, "If the class has - or rolls - THIS ability, you can't roll for an AWC ability this OTHER ability." For the offensive and defensive trees, I made use of this extensively to restrict SPARK from rolling sword-focused abilities, grenade-focused abilities, cover-focused abilities and a few others, by restricting those abilities from rolling on "anyone with Mechanical Chassis" (internally called 'RobotImmunities'). That seemed to work, except for the pistol perks, which all still generated in.

Hmm... what am I missing...?

[Antifringe]

You can definitely add more perk levels to the AWC. I've done it before, just to see if it works. You don't even need scripts, it's all doable via ini. Things will probably get weird if you add more than 7 tiers to one of the perk trees, since the UI doesn't support it.

[Lyzak]

You can definitely add more perk levels to the AWC. I've done it before, just to see if it works. You don't even need scripts, it's all doable via ini. Things will probably get weird if you add more than 7 tiers to one of the perk trees, since the UI doesn't support it.

I mean... yes, I did figure out that that works It was rather easy. SPARK on the other hand, is proving to be quite the interesting challenge. Poor robit.

[Zyxpsilon]

In theory.. SPARK units are "isolated" from the regular Armory cycles by their DLC status. They basicly hook to the gameplay Engine with "integral" functions while jiggling with procedural assets of their own.
So i'm not surprised most AWC elements can't flow into that code-bottleneck to unlock Spark pawning mechanics even when restricted by unique Perks.

My suggestion of that "A better AWC" mod was more about exploratory details you can see rather than not. It simply develops the entire dynamic structures already written up in the INI file & pushes every possible combinations (of each Classes & Tiers) directly on the HUD. I find it extremely useful when "assembling" new stuff between Levels & "assuming" complex restrictions of Perk -- to determine which exact changes should result in satisfactory conditions. It helps to grasp the ongoing logic as it unfolds visually & ingame rather than through a bunch of code Lines.

Heck i even configured their costs as 0-0-0.. for bug hunting purposes. I can then detect most facts MUCH better while using such a temporary (less chaotic if anything) developping system.