[WOTC] All Followers Supported!
Supported Followers is a terrible mechanic and this mod kills it.
Let us recall, in broad strokes, how pod generation works in XCOM2. Each mission has its own Encounter Lists athat are allowed on it. Normally it’s the list "default leaders" / "default followers", but sitreps can force their own lists on the mission. When the game generates a pod, it first generates a leader at random from the leader list for this mission. After that, it generates followers for this leader, from the follower list in this list. BUT there is an important caveat: this followers need to be supported followers of the chosen leader. For the base game it’s fine, and allows some themed pods. However, once mods are in place, every mod author that adds new enemies needs to decide how they play with every single other modded enemy in the game. The resut is a quadratic complexity mess. Especially once sitreps are in effect, it’s very common to get broken pods where the game couldn’t find any leaders relevant to the current follower, so you get one enemy pods. Terrible mechanic, 0/10, would never play.
What this mod does is add every enemy as a possible follower for every other enemy. This does NOT mean that you’ll get Sectopods as followers for base Officers at Gatecrashers, because the encounter lists still need to specify the enemy as a follower for the given force level. So unless you have a mod that puts sectopods in the DefaultFollower list at force level 1 – this will not be a problem! This is intended for people who play with Diverse Aliens By Force Level and turn on the "Ignore Supported Followers" option. The reason why this mod is needed even with that setting, is that DABFL does nothing if the pod only has one enemy (although this can be changed in DABFL’s settings, but there’s a good reason not to change it, an exercise for the reader is to understand why). So if the game’s pod generation failed to find proper followers, the game will give a pod with only leader, DABFL will get a pod with only 1 enemy, and will skip it. With this mod, it should make it less likely that the game will fail to find followers for a given leader.
If you do NOT use the "Ignore Supported Followers" option, prepare to see vastly different and whackier pods than you are used to. You have been warned.
In XComGame you can find a list of enemies or character groups that this mod will skip. This is just a safety measure, even without it there shouldn’t be too big problems, but this is just an additional precuation to prevent Tygan from being a follower to a sectoid, or something like that (again, this shouldn’t be possible anyway, but just to be safe).
Intended to work with Diverse Aliens By Force Level, and in particular with the "Ignore Supported Followers" mechanic, but will work fine without it. Maybe works also in LWOTC, but LWOTC generates pods in a rather curated way, and this mod might throw the entire logic out of the window. This mod does not work with Civilization 4.
Maybe?
None currently, but if you want to check what are the followers of a given enemy, a AllFollowersSupported_TestUnit console command was added to this mod. Type this, and after that the name of the unit you want to test, for exampe:
AllFollowersSupported_TestUnit "AdvTrooperM1"
and it’ll write whether this unit was processed, and what it’s current supported followers are.
The author is grateful to ReshiKillim, h4ilst0rm, and Zelfana for useful discussions.
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.
