Retaliation Configurator [JANKY MOD]
In the ongoing campaign to expose every single bit of game code to config, some parameters related to retaliations are exposed for convenient manipulation. The mod is a bit janky.
Retaliations are missions that have "soft timer" – they usually kill one civilian per turn, and you need to kill all enemies before you run out of civilians. However, sometimes it just doesn’t work properly. For example. the Haven Assault retaliation type can have enemies murder several civilians per turn. If you play with larger pod sizes, perhaps a "soft timer" of 7 turns is not enough to clear the map for the usual Advent Retaliation mission. Civilians, especially when playing with Civilinas Revamped, may commit suicide due to running enemy overwatch. This results in amazingly frustrating gameplay where those missions are borderline unwinnable.
This mod has three components in it. For usual retaliations, this allows you to easily increase the number of civilians on the map, and this mod highlights the base game config that controls the number of civilians the player needs to save to win the mission. For Haven Assaults, the goal of civilians is not easily accesible, so it is not touched by this mod, but this mod gives easy access to the number of civilians in each of the two civilian groups on the map. Note that this does not affect the number of armed militia guards that participate in the mission. Finally, this mod also provides Civilians the Shadowstep ability, so they won’t commit suicide on enemy overwatch every turn.
By default, this mod makes the Advent Retaliation mission to have 17 civilians on the map, of which you need to save 8. In the Haven Assault mission, the first group will have 5 civilians, and the second group will have 15.
Technically, all of that is possible via manual config edits, but this mod automates the process, making it much more easy to use.
Or at least, this was the original plan. Turns out that even for usual retaliation changing the number of required civilians to save does nothing, except for showing on the UI. The game still considers a mission with more than 6 civilians saved a victory. Thus, this mod now will try to force the loss if less than the configured number of civilians was saved. I can’t guarantee it’ll work all the time, but looks like it does.
There are two config files to look for in this mod.
XComMissions: The EditRetal variable allows you to set the minimum required civlilians to be saved on a retaliation mission. The mission will still count as won if more than 6 civilians are saved, but if you save less than the config value, the region will be lost. This is unless you disable the DisconnectOnFail setting this mod comes with.
Next, this config file has the rules of how to increase the civilian pod size for the Haven Assault mission, and how many civilians on the map should be in the Advent Retaliation mission. Important comment: the distribution of civilians on the map in the Advent Retaliation mission is somewhat randomized based on the base game distribution. This is re-rolled every time you start the game. This is just because the author was too lazy to decide on concrete LOP offsets for the new civilian pods. The results could be unusual civilian placement compared to what the reader is used to. However, if you play with Civilians Revamped, then civilians move all the time, so it should not matter in the long term.
XComGame: controls which untis get the Shadowstep ability.
In principle, both files contain a bit more config options than explained here. The configs in XComMissions for example can be hijacked to create a Walmart-DABFL mod. The author takes no responsibility for the outcome of such weird experiments.
Also, Shadowstep is NOT (supposed to be) granted to Civilian VIPs that you can control. If you control them, then it’s your responsibility to notice if they trigger overwatch or not, moreover, the player may WANT to trigger overwatch with the VIP (if the VIP is guaranteed to survive, then injuries on them don’t matter, so it might be advantageous in certain situations). The shadowstep is only granted to civilians (and civilian faceless) who you CANNOT control.
Should work with mostly everything. Might not work with Batman Arkham Origins.
This mod does absolutely nothing in LWOTC.
The shadowstep addresses the issue that comes up with Civilians Revamped mod, but that mod is not required.
This mod is a bit janky:
- I was unable to confirm if my way to change the required number of civilians to rescue works with Haven Assaults, so for the moment I only enabled it for normal retaliations. If I get evidence that it works for Haven Assaults, I’ll also turn it on. You can experiment with enabling the config yourself.
- If you have pyrrhic victories, save more than 6 people and less than the config’ed value, you’ll keep the region.
- If you change the config value to be below 6, then saving less than 6 people will still fail the mission.
- Narrative moments will still make it sound like you won the mission if you saved more than 6 but less than the config’ed number.
- Unfortunately I don’t see an easy way to solve all of these issues, so I mark this mod as Janky at best. Use at your own risk.
The author originally learned the idea of increasing the civilian pod sizes for Haven Assault via manual config edits from Kexx.
The author is grateful to h4ilst0rm and Stukov for their useful comments.
The author would like to thank the users of the MEME Discord Server for the continued emotional support.
The mod preview image was done with the help of an AI.
