Allies Unknown Redux Species: Dragons

This mod adds a new recruitable unit to XCOMs alien roster: The Draconians

Genetically engineered by ADVENT from some dragon DNA acquired on a distant planet, these anthropomorphic dragons are angry at their creators and ready to bring the Elders down.

• To get it out of the way first, stats: the draconians sport 10 extra aim than your average soldier, 10 extra points of defense, 1 extra point of armor, and about 10 more will points on average. They are sure to be stronger than any puny humans and a worthy addition to your squad.
• Wings: they can’t fly, but their wing muscles allow them to jump up ledges with ease, much like Sparks can.
• Draconic Hide: the draconians’ tough scales not only shield them against the elements, granting them resistance against any kind of environmental damage (fire, acid, poison, and frost), but they also harden themselves in preparation for upcoming damage; any turn your draconic soldier does not attack, they’ll gain ablative HP that scales with their rank, as long as they have less than 6 ablative HP remaining.
• Dragon Shout: these are skyrim dragons, so naturally they can shout words of power at their enemies, blowing up their cover and leaving them disoriented in the process.

But wait! There’s more:

• If you have Allies Unknown Redux Species: Vipers installed, your draconians can equip that mod’s M.A.W. Implants which grants them a powerful Breath Weapon attack. The basic Neutral Implant grants a dragon fire breath, but each of the more advanced implants grants a different ability to spice up your draconic soldier’s arsenal.

As you can gather from the list above, I’ve made the dragons a tad bit OP–I will not take criticism on this, they deserve it. As such, by default, the draconians aren’t available to be recruited straight from the avenger. Instead, after you complete the first Alien Faction’s Rescue Mission and have investigated the Blacksite, you will get a new Covert Action to locate a draconic soldier to join your ranks.

The Covert Action will spawn a rescue mission, just like the ones to rescue soldiers captured by the Chosen, where you’ll be tasked to reach the cell where a draconian is being held and break them out. Unlike your regular rescue mission, however, you won’t be dragging their corpse to the evac zone while ADVENT swarms the place. Dragons are not fond of being captive, so your rescuee will stand up as soon as their cell is open and will be ready to give ADVENT hell.

After the first Covert Action is complete, it will be tossed into the covert action deck to be randomly drawn each month.

Most of the stuff about the abilities and the covert action are configurable. All the configs you’ll need are probably found between XComAlliesUnknown.ini, XComAUDragons.ini, and XComDragonsMAWConfig.ini, other than the draconians’ stats.

Don’t forget to go to Options > Gameplay and set the slider for the Skyrim:Dragons to the minimum so that humans don’t generate using Unslain’s cosmetics.
You have free range to use regular soldiers’ cosmetic options on your draconic soldiers–so go wild.

Additionally, Unslains’s mod comes with a genuinely obscene amount of cosmetc options for the dragons, including several recolors for each of the dragon types in Skyrim. The draconians will be generated in a full matching set of cosmetics so they look fully like one of the dragon types in its original color (unless you get the 1/11 roll for the regular dragon’s tintable variant, in that case expect a bright DND-like chromatic dragon 😉 ). Once generated, feel free to mix-and-match stuff to your heart’s content.

Unslain worked so hard on creating faction hero cosmetics for the dragons that I simply couldn’t let them go to waste. Unfortunately, due to how Allies Unknown is configured and how the custom character types are handled by the game’s code, your draconic rookie can’t train into one of the hero classes. So, if you want your Skirmisher, Templar, or Reaper to be a full-fledged draconic soldier capable of resisting fire and screaming at your enemies, grab Grimy’s Console Commands and use "GiveSoldierAWCAbility "UNIT NAME" AUDragon_Homemade 0" to give them all the perks of being a dragon (save for the M.A.W. slot, sorry 😡 ).

The narratives surrounding the rescue mission are the same as when rescuing a captured soldier, so the mission text will look a bit out of place and Central will be speaking about "getting our operative back" and other very small details.
I still haven’t figured out how to get the particle FX for the breath attacks to display properly, I’m half a coder at best so visuals are a bit beyond my skill set. If I ever get them to work I’ll update the mod so it looks more polished.

Obviously Allies Unknown Redux is required to be able to recruit the draconians to your forces. But, and don’t quote me on this, you can probably get away without it if you just wanna use the Homemade dragons.

Mitzruti’s Perk Pack is required for the icon used for several abilities in this mod, as well as for the effect that handles the resistance to elemental damage.

To be able to see your dragons, you’ll need Unslains’s Children of Akatosh – Skyrim Dragon/Dovah Race Cosmetics, as all of the cometics used are from his mod. Added All-Armour Avenger as a requirement to ensure the dragons don’t look silly in the avenger, this is just good to have for Allies Unknown in general tbf.

Not a hard-requirement, but grab yourself Allies Unknown Redux Species: Vipers so that your dragons can breathe fire when equipping a M.A.W. Implant.

Thanks to Unslain for allowing me to port his legendary dragons cosmetics for this mod, for ripping the sound-bites for the abilities, for creating a stupid amount of dragon names from scratch as well as some of the backstories for them, and for commissioning EvilBob for the gorgeous icon for the Dragon Shout ability (and probably much more that I don’t recall).
Huge thanks to Fancyneer for agreeing to do the animations for this before I even started working on it–they are the reason the dragons are able to seamlessly jump up buildings and look cool while shouting and breathing fire.
Thanks to Mitzruti yet again for the amazing Mitzruti’s Perk Pack, which I’ve used to build the icon for the Draconic Hide perk, not counting the several other icons used from his mod.
Thanks to Mr Danger Dude I didn’t have to create the items to hold the several types of breath weapons from scratch and could, instead, use the framework he’d created for the M.A.W. Implants. The abilties for the breath weapons are also mostly his code, all I did was make them use cones as the targeting method.
Thanks to Iridar for helping me understand how custom BuildVisualizations work, which allowed me to get the animations, sound bites, and flyovers to work as intended, and for helping me fix the M.A.W. Implants code (it was a weird one).
And massive thanks to everyone on the XCom modded discord who helped me get the abilities working just right, or just hung out and helped design the mod as I was working on it.