Vipers on force level 1 on Legendary

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kryft
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Apr 25, 2020 7:53 pm

Vipers on force level 1 on Legendary

Post by kryft »

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but almost everyone seems to think it shouldn't be possible. If this is intended behavior, I would like to update UFOpaedia.

Mostly enemy spawns seem to follow the tables on ufopedia, but on Legendary difficulty you can occasionally get a pod leader that's at least 2 force levels too high. I've had a muton in a normal jailbreak mission on April 4th, and I've seen a viper on force level 1 at least twice. I've even seen a viper replacing the sectoid on Gatecrasher once.

I was originally using some UI and QoL mods that shouldn't affect game mechanics at all, but I even confirmed that this can happen with a clean XCOM 2 install, freshly generated .ini files and no other mods than LW2. I have a save game from that campaign where a viper shows up on the first mission after gatecrasher (a basic jailbreak), when the force level should still be 1.

I found this reddit thread with a comment by faket15 that claims that this actually happens on legendary in vanilla XCOM 2 as well. I have no reason to doubt faket15, but I haven't found any other information about this. Can someone confirm that this is true? Is it a feature or a bug (if that matters at this point :D ), and are the exact mechanics (such as how much higher the force level can be) known?

I did find one thread about vipers on gatecrasher here on the Pavonis forums, but it seems like people there are either conflating advent strength and force level, or there's some kind of connection between the two that I haven't seen described anywhere.
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johnnylump
Site Admin
Posts: 1262
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 4:12 am

Re: Vipers on force level 1 on Legendary

Post by johnnylump »

My memory may be faulty, but I think we ultimately determined there was some extra level being applied on legendary in vanilla code that we can neither see nor mod. Not sure how it works or if there is some conditional trigger, though.
kryft
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Apr 25, 2020 7:53 pm

Re: Vipers on force level 1 on Legendary

Post by kryft »

Great, thanks for confirming this!
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