XCOM 2
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Mission Penalty Rebalance
   
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27 Apr, 2016 @ 8:32pm
28 Apr, 2016 @ 5:07pm
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Mission Penalty Rebalance

Description
Tweaks rewards and penalties for missions to make the strategic game a bit less snowball-y, and add more contrast between the various mission types.

"Opportunistic" missions, like guerilla ops and supply raids, no longer penalize you for skipping or failing them - instead, you simply miss out on potential rewards. However, in contrast, retaliations (ADVENT's way to strike back) are more punishing and will almost never benefit XCOM.

Note that you can individually choose which of these changes to apply in the INI. So if you don't want the punishing retaliations, just remove the corresponding line.

Guerilla Ops
Failing a guerilla operation no longer instantly completes the associated dark event - it will simply continue preparing as normal. Skipping a guerilla op will not cause dark event projects to accelerate.

Supply Raids / Landed UFOs
Failing or skipping these missions no longer causes you to lose contact with the region. This never really made sense to me in the first place.

Council Missions
Again, failing these missions would inexplicably cause you to lose contact with the region. This penalty has been removed.

Retaliation Missions
Inspired by Long War's terror missions, where you were really just trying to mitigate the suck.
Maybe now the dark event that accelerates retaliations will be a little less of a joke.

The outcome of a retaliation now depends on the number of civilians you manage to rescue.

While winning still ensures that you keep contact with the region, it does not stop the damage done from reducing supply income. Fortunately, you can reduce this penalty by saving as many civilians as possible!

On the bright side, if you win but end up slightly under the target civilian count (6), you may still have a chance to keep contact with the region, albeit with a hefty supply penalty. So hopefully these missions will feel slightly less binary.

Full reward/penalty breakdown (this is all customizable):

  • 12 or 13 civs saved: +10% region income (vanilla bonus)
  • 11 civs saved: +5% region income
  • 10 civs saved: +2% region income
  • 9 civs saved: -3% region income
  • 8 civs saved: -6% region income
  • 7 civs saved: -10% region income
  • 6 civs saved: -15% region income
  • 5 civs saved: -20% region income, 40% chance to lose contact
  • 4 civs saved: -22% region income, 80% chance to lose contact
  • 3 civs saved: -25% region income, lose contact
  • 2 civs saved: -28% region, -8% continent income, lose contact
  • 1 civ saved: -32% region, -15% continent income, lose contact
  • 0 civs saved: -35% region income, -25% continent income, lose contact

Note that if you extract instead of securing the AO, you will always lose the region, but the income penalties are still the same. So even if you can't win, you should still try to rescue at least 3 civilians before pulling out!

Compatibility
This should be compatible with anything that doesn't also change the mission failure penalties.
There is some specific handling for retaliations without civilians (eg. Haven Siege).

Notable exceptions which are incompatible would be "No Region Disconnect" and "Partial Mission Completion". The first is a superset of this one and the second overrides the same functions.

Existing saves will work fine - in fact, you can even apply this mod while inside of a mission and it will take effect immediately. It can also be removed at any time without any ill effects.

23 Comments
DewFuel 8 Sep, 2017 @ 7:15pm 
oh snap, thanks!
Anisotropic  [author] 8 Sep, 2017 @ 6:09pm 
Updated version for WotC: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1130972839

Firaxis made some similar changes to retaliations so that part was taken out.
DewFuel 8 Sep, 2017 @ 5:27pm 
wotc compatiable?
Boisegangpc 21 Jun, 2017 @ 8:46pm 
I have had an issue that I'm not sure was supposed to happen. I'm using the Mission Penalty Rebalance mod and Scanning Sites Plus. I scanned a PoI, and when I saw that none of the rewards were worth risking my soldiers, I skipped it.

And then the region was disconnected. I didn't even notice until today(it was about 3-5 days ago that this happened) because there was no pop-up. This was my home region, so I've lost my HQ and cannot reconnect with the region. Here's a screenshot: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=952165231
Indiaman_At_Sea 31 Dec, 2016 @ 5:13pm 
@ eclecticbibliophile Now I'm no computer code person ( I hate going through code, seriously. )
give me a list of the mods you had active, and maybe I can think up the mod that may be causing it. If it's not a mod, I can't do nothin'. But I know (sometimes) what causes a mod(s) to basically not let other mods work.
Dragon32 11 Oct, 2016 @ 9:42am 
@Blaze
For ADVENT Siege alter iDefaultCivsSavedWon in the INI. If you set it to e.g. 10 then you get a 2% Supplies increase for a succesful mission.
For the vanilla terror missions you need to alter all the fRegionIncomeLoss[#] values, where # is the number of civs saved, note that a negative value is an increase in Supplies from that region.
Blaze 10 Oct, 2016 @ 9:27pm 
I have just one question. If a Civilian survives the map, but I don't run up to them to "save" them, do they still count as saved, or no? Also, how DOES the handling of Haven Siege go? Because I've seen two retaliations in my file so far, a normal one and a siege. The normal one reported on the result screen a loss of 7 or so income. At three territories, this somehow knocked my income down to -2. After the Haven Siege, my income further plummeted to -32.

This feels rather excessively punishing in the early-game when supplies are one of the biggest obstacles to getting things done.
I Beat Moderate AI 3 Oct, 2016 @ 1:51pm 
Great! Exactly as it should have been in the first place.
eclecticbibliophile 9 Jul, 2016 @ 7:37pm 
Had a retaliation mission earlier today, saved ten civilians but got a penalty to region income afterwards. I am running a number of mods, but no obvious suspects come to mind. Any idea what could cause such a bug?
Captain Cosmo 9 Jul, 2016 @ 1:48pm 
You're telling me this mod will let me ignore a boring but mandatory landed ufo mission that I really don't need to do and have my guys down for another week, further delaying the big mission I'm trying to get them onto? Sold!