[WOTC] Officer Class Redux

After considerable time away from the XCOM 2 modding scene it appears I’ve been bitten by the modding bug once more. This time I’ve dived into reworking a whole class mod! K’s Officer Class by C. Justice (Lt. A.Kouassi) to be exact. I downloaded this class and was using it in game for a while before I came to my decision to rework it. It’s a very fun class but a few things were bugging me and I figured I’d try to smooth things out and improve a couple of features in it while I was at it.

I’ve remade most of the UI icons, the originals were a bit basic and didn’t fit the feel and theme of the default ones. I have remade all of the rank icons and the class icon and have made a couple of custom ability UI icons. I have kept the feel of what the originals were going for but I’ve made them fit into the game a little better.

Next up I added a Officer Cap cosmetic/hat into the mod. There was a really great one in Just Kevin’s Kev’s Military Hats mod but it was not tintable, to my disappointment, so I have made it tintable and have added it to this mod so your officers can look the part a bit better.

After the Officer started to look the part I thought I’d rework a few of the abilities as well. Most of them worked pretty well, a couple weren’t quite working as I imagine they were intended and there was a new one I wanted to add that I felt fit quite well. Lets go over the changes shall we?

Binoculars – I found that the Binoculars ability wasn’t actually working quite right. It was adding the extra view range but it wasn’t updating the fog of war event to update fog of war after using the ability so you couldn’t actually see any further. (At least not until you moved which is not all that helpful considering you only have it for one turn and have used an action point to use it in the first place.) I’m not sure it’s possible to make the fog of war layer update right after using the ability, I did try, so I ended up reworking it entirely.

It now works like the battle scanner but you don’t throw it. It’s a radius around the Officer. It doubles the Officer’s sight range from 20 to 40 for one turn and reveals (but doesn’t activate) pods in the fog. You can just see them and their health bars in the fog for a single turn allowing you to plan stuff out and know where things are better, has a 3 turn cooldown and I made it a free use ability, no action point cost. Maybe the cooldown could have been higher, it’s a very powerful scouting ability but if you want you can up the cooldown in the XComGameData_SoldierSkills.ini config file. I figured you’re taking these officers into the mission for the tactical advantage so only being able to use his abilities once per mission is a bit lame. (Which would be the case when the abilities were at 5 turn cooldowns.) Most abilities take around 3 turns to cooldown with a couple of exceptions.

Appoint DSIC – This one felt a bit strong to me, it felt a bit more like a Colonel ability rather than a Lieutenant Colonel ability so I moved it to the third promotion track. It requires a training center to acquire now but this feels right anyway and you’ll probably have it built by the time the Officer gets to Colonel anyway so it’s not really a big deal. It’s a interesting ability and it didn’t make sense to remove it so I figured I’d just move it to the third promotion track.

Bolster – The new ability I added to replace Appoint DSIC on at Lieutenant Colonel on the second promotion track. It’s basically the Shieldbearer’s shield ability. A once per mission use that grants all nearby soldiers 3 points of temporary shield that lasts 3 turns. Sadly couldn’t get the animation/effects to translate to this ability but it’s working mechanically so I figured that’d be good enough for now. Turns out that what gives soldiers the shield effect is likely baked into the Shieldbearer’s skeletal mesh and I’m not great with the modeling side of things so I just couldn’t get it to work on this ability. It’s a shame, I did try, I really did. At least the ability works mechanically.

Take Cover! – Take cover didn’t need much changing and I couldn’t change it how I had originally wanted to. I wanted it to apply Hunker Down along with a 15+ boost to defense for a turn (down from 45) but there doesn’t seem to be a way to force a targeted ally into hunker down. (I mostly just wanted it to put the targeted solider into the animation.) The bane of this mod is animations it seems. Instead I changed it so that it can only target allied soldiers that are in cover (applying the ability to troops standing out in the open didn’t make much sense to me) and it boosts defense by 15 while also applying the benefits of what they would get from hunker down. (+30 Defense and +50 Dodge) This effect lasts 1 turn and it has a 3 turn cooldown. It makes it a situational yet powerful alternative to using something like Aid Protocol. Boost a front line trooper’s defense and make them harder to hit for a turn, good for melee classes and the like that need to push up close. That’s it for ability changes I think.

Other changes I made were to remove the mod dependencies it use to have. I made Primary Secondaries optional instead of mandatory and I removed the Mr Koval’s GTS-only trainable classes mod functionality since I realised it wasn’t really needed since WOTC kind of has what that mod does built in by default now. If you still want to train officers instead of having rookies promote into them you can change a setting in the .ini config to achieve this.

Just change +NumInDeck=3 to 0 in the XComClassData.ini config then you’re good to go. Trainable Officers, no random promoting into Officer. Easy.

I gave the Officer the ability to use a rifle as their primary weapon which makes Primary Secondaries mod optional. Most people use this mod anyway, it’s not a big issue but I thought it would be nice to make the mod usable without requiring another dependency. Let’s face it though, using a pistol for the Officer’s primary weapon is what you would expect and is definitely what I’ll be using. It just looks cool.

Primary Secondaries Mod: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1142234205

Other than that I just tided up and rewrote some of the ability descriptions and made some of the rank names shorter so they fit on the promotion UI. I also renamed the specializations to fit the UI better as well. They’re now called Leader, Tactician and Commandant. Quite fitting too I’d say and it looks nicer when everything fits on the UI.

For a full class breakdown check the patch notes by clicking here. There’s too much to include it all in this description.

C. Justice (Lt. A.Kouassi) – A big thank you to the initial work C. Justice (Lt. A.Kouassi) put into this class, the bones were very strong and gave me a great place to work from. Creator of the original mod that this one builds upon.
Original mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1126186107

Just Kevin – For modelling an amazing officer cap that I was able to add tint capability to and include for this mod.
Original mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1865498236