[WOTC] Standalone LWOTC Alien Pack

This alien pack is essentially a port of the original Long War 2 Alien Pack, remastered for use with XCOM 2 War of The Chosen. It is intended to provide a host of more challenging aliens to fight against and it is hoped by the author that it will provide a slightly lighter-weight alternative to other complete enemy overhauls, such as A Better Advent (although it is compatible with it, you may find the enemy variety a bit overwhelming using both at the same time).

The port uses a mixture of the original Alien Pack code, along with recent additions from members of the Long War of the Chosen team who ported much of this content but didn’t get around to releasing the Alien Pack as a standalone item for WOTC. Please do not install this mod alongside LWOTC, it would be completely pointless!!!

This version of the mod also includes many additional enemies that did not make it into the original standalone alien pack but were eventually included in LW2 & LWOTC (see full details below).

• Advent Gunner (M1, M2, M3)
  – Cannon troopers capable of shredding & area suppression
• Advent Engineer (M1, M2, M3)
  – Troopers equipped with grenade launcher,
• Advent Rocketeer (M1, M2, M3)
  – Troopers equipped with gauntlet-style rocket launcher
• Advent Sentry (M1, M2, M3)
  – Troopers specialising in overwatch abilities
• Advent Sergeant (M1, M2)
  – Variations on advanced & elite troopers
• Advent Field Commander (M1, M2)
  – Stronger Advent Generals (33% chance of spawn on appropriate missions)
• Advent Commando
  – All-rounders with good defense, dodge and aim
• Advent Scout
  – High mobility low damage troopers
• Advent Shock Trooper
  – Tanky close quarters units
• Advent Vanguard
  – Even tankier close quarters specialists with various close combat abilities
• Muton (M2, M3)
  – More robust & high damage versions of vanilla mutons, War cry can buff nearby allies
• Viper (M2, M3)
  – More robust & high damage versions of vanilla vipers
• Naja (M1, M2, M3)
  – Viper-sniper – high aim, squadsight, large engagement distance, squishy
• Sidewinder (M1, M2, M3)
  – Flanking viper – High crit damage, average robustness
• Sectoid Commander (M2)
  – Mass mindspin and mass zombie spawn
• Drone (M1, M2)
  – Long War style drones with shock, stun and repair. Chance of single pods
• MEC Archers (M1, M2)
  – Advent MECs capable of long-range bombardment with micro-missiles
• MEC M3
  – Very high robustness version of Advent MEC
• Chryssalid Soldier
  – More robust and higher damage version of vanilla chryssalids
• Great Archon
  – More robust and higher damage version of vanilla archon
• Lost Grappler
  – Lost with bladestorm ability

All of the new aliens are fully compatible with the excellent UFOpedia & Bestiary

Please note that the hive queen from the original pack has been removed – her AI & abilities were using base-game behaviour so she just became a ‘bullet sponge’ version of the vanilla enemy. Additionally, large units cause all sorts of visualization problems so until I could get round to making a ‘better’ version, it seemed the right choice. Plus, The Hive really has the monopoly on Chryssalids at the moment!).

I have made a few balance tweaks from the original LW pack – see below:

1. Lowered sentry mag tier damage by 1 to make the jump from M1 to M2 a bit less jarring
2. Added some shredding to the advent gunner’s cannon & adjusted damage spread
3. Tweaked the Naja across all tiers (tightened damage spread, decreased engagement distance and lowered damage output)
4. Reduced sidewinder base damage but increased critical damage
5. Lowered some Advent base damage which wasn’t force-level appropriate
6. Slightly increased damage of some later force-level units (M3 MEC, M2 Mec Archer, M2 Archon, M2 Sectoid) where they were originally using base-game loadouts & give the M2 Archon pinions a slightly larger range & increased number of targets / rockets (to 6 from 4).
7. Tweaked some of the spawn weights to obtain a reasonable balance between vanilla units and units from the pack

From recent community feedback I have implemented the following improvements:

• Added Iridar’s Advent Arsenal support to many units (Please note, this mod is not required).
• Exposed all units’ weapon damage to config (these can be edited through XComGameData_WeaponData.ini) so they can be modified directly or through other mods. I have now given each enemy in the pack their own weapon templates so all weapon damages can be adjusted, along with various other key abilities (e.g. archon melee / blazing pinions / MEC micro missiles / rocket damage)
• Updated the ideal ranges for the newer LW2 units’ weapons which weren’t set properly & exposed these to config

Mods Which have, or may have compatibility issues – Use at your own risk

• Advent Sentry:
  https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1191707123
• Elite Alien Pack:
  https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1563023889
• Muton Centurion Standalone:
  https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1972274071
• Sectoid Commander:
  https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1559273775
• Muton Elite:
  https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1553079312

The drones in Alpha’s Drone & Robotics Pack and HectorCXs drones should be fully compatible. Please let me know in the comments if you experience problems running these together.

Should work with the vast majority of other modded enemies, as well as Diverse Alien Pods or Diverse Aliens by Force Level).

• Pavonis Interactive For all their work on building the models / assets and original code for these aliens as part of the Long War project
• Tedster and the LWOTC team for their support with merging code between the LW2 alien pack and the current fork of LWOTC
• RustyDios for his input on getting the compatibility between the LW2 unit customizer and bestiary working & (once again) for the mod preview image 🙂
• Alpha115 for his help getting the drone AI working properly

As always, I welcome comments and am an active face in the modding community so if you experience bugs / issues please reach out to me & I’ll do what I can to resolve your issues. If possible, please try to be specific with errors ("Your mod crashed my game" is not very helpful – If you can provide logs, redscreens, specific details of when the errors occurred and so on, I will be much more able (and willing) to help you 🙂