Better Veterans

Gives the "veteran" rookie (aka "Old World Hero") added by the Resistance Warrior Pack at campaign start some long-overdue improvements. These improvements include:

* No more veterans with terribad stats! A veteran rookie will never be generated with below average stats, and your vet will get a boost to a random stat to simulate prior experience. Do NOT expect this to make your vet a super soldier; this change is only meant to correct a widely-criticized shortcoming of the original DLC and NOT to give you an uber rookie winbutton. These features can now be disabled via simple config edits.

* Fixes some of the weird default behavior of DLC_Day_0 regarding cosmetics, and normalizes veteran customizations between the DLC and vanilla armor sets. So if a custom soldier from your Character Pool is picked to be a veteran rookie, its original hairstyle will be copied over to the DLC_Day_0 armor set. No more annoying inconsistancies between head customizations, and reduces likelihood of permanently stuck torso decos being added during character generation.

* New! Added a whitelist feature for headgear cosmetics! This allows some control over the headgear that veterans may spawn with. You can add (or remove) cosmetics via "+ValidGear" entries in the XComBetterVeterans.ini config file. By default, only the standard vanilla XCOM cosmetics are whitelisted, but templatenames from modded cosmetics can be added, as well! Note that this only affects randomly generated veterans, not those pulled from your Character Pool.

Base minimum stats for the veteran recruit are now:
4 HP
12 Mobility
50 Will
67 Aim

The random veteran bonus gives one of the following buffs:
+1 HP
+1 Mobility
+10 Aim
+20 Hacking

Bear in mind that those are base minimum stats for veteran rookies, not maximum possible starting stats. I tried to balance the base states and bonuses keeping in mind mods such as "SWR Not Created Equal WOTC," but also taking vanilla XCOM2 into account. Better Veterans is not meant to be a cheat or uber mod. It’s only meant to give vets added by the Resistance Warrior DLC a bit of a bump, not turn them into super soldiers!

On the cosmetic side of things, the "Blowout" hairstyle (Classic_M & Classic_F) is no longer the default hairstyle for veteran recruits. Why? Because I hate that hairstyle with a passion, that’s why. I’m not a violent man, but every time I see Blowout hair it makes me want to punch something. So it’s gone. If you REALLY want it back as a customization option (gross), simply comment out the relevant lines in XcomContent.ini.

Originally the mod started as a quick, simple ini edit to get rid of the Blowout hairstyle. But that only succeeded in removing it from customization menus and random character generation. Veterans were still spawning with that accursed hairstyle because it was being assigned to them directly from X2DownloadableContentInfo_DLC_Day0.uc. Once I figured that out, things just kind of spiraled down the rabbit hole. After I started digging around in the code, I was like "Hey, why don’t I make veteran stats not suck?"
Anyway, I hadn’t touched unreal script since around 2003, so the whole process of making this mod was extremely upsetting and traumatic.

"Better Veterans" should be compatible with 99% of WOTC mods, as I didn’t use any overrides. That includes mods that affect new character generation, such as Iridar’s "Clean Soldier Generation" and Thegrimsqueaker’s "Improved Soldier Generation WOTC" since my mod only modifies characters after the fact. The same goes for mods such as "SWR Not Created Equal WOTC" as, again, Better Veterans only modifies existing characters — it doesn’t interfere with initial character generation. All that being said…

• "Better Veterans" will obviously conflict with the "Disable Old World Hero" mod by TheNiTrex. Expect unexpected behavior if you try to run both mods.
• The "Unrestricted Customization" mod (or anything like it) may prevent this mod from restricting access to the Blowout hairstyle. It’s called Unrestricted Customization for a reason. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

The cosmetic fixes/normalization that this mod does between the vanilla kevlar & DLC kevlar armor sets works for both randomly generated soldiers and those pulled from the Character Pool. But it only works for the veteran recruit at the START of a new campaign. What my mod doesn’t do is permanently correct any buggy cosmetic mods you may have downloaded that don’t play well with the Resistance Warrior DLC. The best way to avoid stuck decos is to avoid using buggy cosmetic mods which cause stuck decos. 😛

Also, if you have a bugged soldier saved into your Character Pool and the Resistance Warrior Pack DLC chooses that soldier for its veteran rookie when starting a new game, then your veteran rookie will likely end up with totally broken/stuck cosmetics when wearing the DLC_Day_0 armors. That’s just how XCOM2 works. The best way to avoid it, as you may have guessed, is to avoid saving broken toons into your Character Pool.

Fix for incorrect veteran birth dates: Birthdates WOTC .

If you have any problems related to the mod, leave a comment. You can also leave a comment (or a thumbs up) if you like the mod, or want to share how Blowout hair has negatively affected your enjoyment of XCOM over the years.