[WOTC] Alternate Bleedout Mechanics

Adds a new Second Wave Advanced Option that can be selected when starting a new game to enable Alternate Bleedout Mechanics based on a combination of Overkill Damage and the average of current/maximum Will.

As a Second Wave option, this must be enabled at the start of a new campaign and will have no effect in campaigns where it has not been enabled (meaning you do not have to turn the mod on and off between different campaigns with different settings). The option is enabled in the Advanced Options menu just like the other base-game Second Wave options (Beta-Strike, etc.).

If you are using Better Second Wave Mod Support , you can also enable or disable the option in the middle of an existing campaign. NOTE: Better Second Wave Mod Support is only required for the mid-campaign setting change; it is not a dependancy for any other features of the mod so it’s an optional element you can use or not, depending on your needs.

Requires the WOTC Community Highlander :
Why?: The Highlander adds support for overriding the bleedout chance. Without it, the mod can’t hook in to do any of its work!

Base X2 bleedout mechanics punish your soldier for being low level with little you can do to impact it. WOTC bleedout mechanics are a little better and punish your soldier for having low Will, which is partially based on their level and partially on deployment situations and mission performance (i.e. player interacting factors). This mod’s bleedout mechanics seek to take that one step further by punishing YOU for failing to keep your soldiers healed up! (i.e. even more dependent on player interacting factors)

When the Alternate Bleedout Mechanic is enabled, the chance for a unit to bleedout will be adjusted, starting at a base chance based on the soldier’s rank (to still give higher ranked soldiers a little bit of an edge), then adding %chance based on the average of the soldier’s current and max Will, and finally subtracting %chance based on the amount of Overkill Damage the soldier received. That lucky crit through high cover one-shotting a unit from full health is not likely to deal a lot of overkill damage, so the bleedout chance will be pretty good; however, leave a wounded soldier running around on 1HP and the next hit they take is likely to put them in the dirt for good!

Base bleedout chances, especially early game, will be much higher than the standard mechanics’, but as the game progresses and enemies become more capable of dealing high amounts of damage, the danger increases dramatically if you aren’t taking care of your wounded soldier’s HP. This serves as one more step in the community’s collective effort to straighten-out the game’s reverse difficulty curve. The default values will modify Bleedout Chance according to the following graph:

The tables below show example chances over the full range of Will/Overkill Damage values. A base chance for a Ltn. (3 promotions) is used for this example: (click image for link to larger version)

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Overkill Damage is capped at 10 and Stay With Me will increase the base bleedout chance per rank as well as reduce the impact Overkill Damage has on the calculation by 30%. The base chances per rank with and without Stay With Me can be edited in the config files, and specific soldier templates can be excluded from the alternate bleedout mechanics if necessary (It get’s applied to character templates as a default ability in OnPostTemplatesCreated).

Many thanks to Firaxis for a mod-friendly game and the Community Highlander team for additional modding support – yet another mod that would not have been possible without their help!

• Values need more extensive ‘real-world’ testing – that’s where you come in! If you try it out, please let me know how it feels throughout the various stages of a campaign.

(See Change Notes for full history)

1.1.0:
• Updated formulas:
• Changed base chance to be soldier rank above Squaddie * 2.5 (5.0 if ‘Stay With Me’ is active).
• Changed Will contribution from exponential growth to logarithmic since high Will gains are the exception rather than the norm (misconception on my end).
• Changed Overkill Damage contribution multiplier from 0.5 to 0.7 for when ‘Stay With Me’ is active.

1.0.0:

• Initial Release!.

Please let me know what you think of the mod, if you run into bugs, or if you have balance concerns. Thanks and enjoy!