[WotC] Ruler Rework
This mod reworks the Alien Ruler turns, attempting to make them more interactive and less of an attrition battle.
It does this by making three major changes to how Rulers work.
- Rulers don’t react to movement.
- This allows you to reposition your soldiers during a Ruler battle, which significantly changes how they play. You can now take cover against a ruler, spread your soldiers out when faced with an AoE attack, and try to stay out of its line of sight to stop it reacting to you. Abilities like Momentum and Implacable are no longer a liability.
Rulers will still react to any non-movement action taken by XCOM that they see, so managing your actions cleverly is just as important as it was before.
- This allows you to reposition your soldiers during a Ruler battle, which significantly changes how they play. You can now take cover against a ruler, spread your soldiers out when faced with an AoE attack, and try to stay out of its line of sight to stop it reacting to you. Abilities like Momentum and Implacable are no longer a liability.
- Rulers react to any non-free action that targets them.
- This means they’ll now react to squadsight shots, and that they can fight back against Raiders and Lost. Vanilla rulers get stuck if they can’t see any XCOM units, allowing third party factions and Squadsight units to attack them indefinitely. In vanilla, a concealed spotter and a Squadsight sniper can kill a Ruler in one battle without it ever being able to react.
- Rulers get a single action turn of their own.
- This stops Rulers getting stuck if they break line-of-sight to every XCOM unit: they’ll be able to spend an action moving back into range. It also allows the Ruler to chain two actions together on the alien turn (their last reaction and their one action turn), balancing out their inability to react to movement. Be careful ending a turn near the Archon King: it’s quite fond of using this to set up and knock down Icarus Drop in one go.
This replaces the bizarre vanilla system where Rulers would get bonus actions if XCOM skipped any.
- This stops Rulers getting stuck if they break line-of-sight to every XCOM unit: they’ll be able to spend an action moving back into range. It also allows the Ruler to chain two actions together on the alien turn (their last reaction and their one action turn), balancing out their inability to react to movement. Be careful ending a turn near the Archon King: it’s quite fond of using this to set up and knock down Icarus Drop in one go.
I’ve tested this mod a fair bit, and I’m very happy with how it plays. The Rulers are still dangerous, but there are now lots of ways to creatively fight back with clever positioning.
This mod overrides the classes X2AbilityTrigger_DLC_Day60OnAbilityActivated and X2Effect_DLC_Day60TurnStartRemoveActionPoints, which makes it incompatible with other mods that edit those classes, for example Ruler Reactions Revised.
It modifies the Ruler action system itself, so it should also work on any modded units with ruler reactions if they use the same setup as the vanilla three do.
Required DLC:
These DLC should be installed in order to use this item.
XCOM 2: Alien Hunters
XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
