i've been using the LWOTC standalone aliens mod and it's been an excellent experience. My experience with other mods that add new enemies is that they tend to be much too powerful compared to vanilla enemies of the same FL and i'm too lazy to reconfigure the enemy lists.

This is the best enemy mod out of the box by far

Finally figured out what mod was causing the missing units: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1128163275&searchtext=ragdoll i suggest this one be added to the incompatibility list

I was also having this problem with missing models for a long time. Since it never worked for me I used to swap models via Enemy reskinner, using reskinned or alternative models from other mods so it can be used as an alternative.

ok after some testing it turns out that the reason sectoid commanders and elite/advanced mutons aren't showing up is because of a compatibility issue with some unknown mod of mine

Minor correction on one of my previous comments, Elite Vipers aren't missing like the Sectoid Commander and Elite & Advanced Mutons are.

@EvilBob22 No i'm not running those mods.

@Biggity Swigger Are you running the Elite Alien Pack mod (or the individual versions)? That has its own versions of the Muton Elite, Sectoid Commander, and Viper Elite and can break this pack. See the compatibility section above.

By the way, I used to run the Elite Alien Pack, but I disabled it after loading this mod. I've never had any trouble with those aliens.

Elite Mutons are also broken again, i'd hazard a guess that the elite vipers are also broken. Haven't seen them in my campaign yet.

Reasoning behind removing tactical sense from all aliens? I thought it was only the Sergeant in the first place

Sectoid Commanders are invisible and have an error icon

@BlackDog - thank you for the clarifications. Compataibility is always good and your foresight has been outstanding. Great work.

Please don't stress yourself on the UECP idea. That was more a notice board inspiration for others to see and hopefully, someone takes up the challenge for the benefit of all.

Never incur the wrath of Reshi. Her Syusa is pain. Her Syusa will claim all.

AHW, in as far as I can tell, incorporates its own green alert mechanics & AI so I didn't touch those units here (& also didn't want to incur the wrath of Reshi ;)) The additions were mostly for the enemies in the pack + units from a handful of older mods which were not added to the vanilla jobs system. I didn't really want to interfere with anything that wholesale changes the green alert mechanics (such as YA) either to avoid a big pile of complaints that enemies were behaving weirdly under x/y/z unconentional scenarios, so the changes were intended to be barely noticeable. Theoretically I suppose it would be possible to split the pod job changes out of this mod & into its own thing, to try to take the UECP approach to adding all modded enemies etc. but yeah...more work & my motivation levels at this stage are not the best.

@BlackDog - There's a set of custom missions that use custom AI jobs to facilitate various things being automated, such as a tank traversing the battlefield, Reshi flavour SectoPod's hunting you down for dooting, and utter nonsense respawning Templars.

Most common problem one is EvacAtRendezvous from base, as there isn't a mod like ECHP that is designed to roll all known modded enemies into simply replacing the job system, though this would help the community at large (automatic layering with Yellow Alert, AHW, etc).

But we digress. Thank you for the thoughtful answers and the time you've taken to explain things.

I'm gonna do a bit of a deeper dive into this if I get a bit of time next week. In LW/LWOTC, they use modified systems for doing this & essentially nuke the entire XComAIJobs config file and re-create it with custom logic, which I suppose is fine for their purposes but doesn't really work here. In general, there should only two places where the job matters - in green alert AI (pod patrolling behaviour etc.) and in red alert AI nodes which use the SelectMove_Job[orSomething] trees. In theory, units assigned specific jobs should move according to the job profiles they've been assigned in red alert as well, based on the existence of those SelectMove_Job nodes and if they're not doing something of a higher priority. In practice, many units don't include that AI node anyway, or their AI is able to consistently use a higher priority action that doesn't fail, meaning the 'do red-alert pod job movement' is rarely called upon.

@BlasckDog
Brilliant. Thanks again.

As long as a pod contains a single unit in the validchars array, that pod can be assigned the job.
I'd feared it would be the opposite, but thinking about it that matches the behaviour I've seen.
Thanks again, I'll make the changes I've talked about to my local .ini, although I think it would be a rare thing for me to get a whole pod of undefined enemies as I don't run that many enemy mods.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, and everything else you do here and in the Highlander.

From my limited understanding, I think it's best if all units are added to the validchars arrays for all jobs (this is what the base game does, although the orders are changed a bit depending on the mission as there is some kind of priority system going on - I don't really fully understand it). Anyway, the job which is ultimately assigned to any given pod is a mishmash of jobs which are forced by the mission kismet, and jobs defined in the XComAIJobs config file. As long as a pod contains a single unit in the validchars array, that pod can be assigned the job. The changes I've made here simply allow pods which contain only modded enemies, to be assigned one as well, rather than defaulting back to the 'observer' job, which means they just stand around not doing anything, when they're not alerted. If it has a single vanilla enemy in it, the behaviour shouldn't be adjusted at all.

@BlackDog
Thanks for the reply, Blackdog.

Whilst I've got you: any tips for assigning Jobs?

I see that the Sidewinder and the EU Berserker are assigned to everything that's not an ADVENT General Job, even Support and Artillery. Those are two very different baddies I wouldn't expect to be doing either of those.

So I deduce adding any enemy to all bar Rendezvous and EvacAtRendezvous would be your recommendation? As Jobs are a thing that happens in the fog of war some weirdness like that is OK?

A command for assessing active jobs would work wonders for helping to track down errant issues within custom missions, similar to the job Encounter List Cleaner does on the background for being able to print out damaged encounter lists.

Thanks again for the great work. Look forward to your next creation.

I'll have a look into a command which prints out the jobs for each unit - I think x2debugai can give some insight on pod jobs but it's not very user friendly, as it reports all the AI nodes and decisions

BlackDog [author] Just now
@dragon32 - Its quite likely that YA adjusts or interferes with the green alert ai anyway so it's unlikely the adjustements to jobs here will make much difference with YA active but I'm not 100% on that. The hope is that the changes will help a bit with objective camping generally but in my experience YA exacrbates that quite a lot, irrespective of other changes!

@BlackDog - Thank you for the very thoughtful and comphrensive response. This was very informative of an aspect we had missed.

We don't wish for you to remove them at all. The knowledge that overhaul crafters can safely remove it within their localised editions without impacting on others use is perfect enough.

Thank your patience and fantastic work.

tbh, I'll probably just add the enemies to the .ini, I'm already editing it for War Cry so I'll just add them in

@BlackDog
That's really interesting. I realise I'm in full-on feature creep here but would a console command to iterate through mod-added enemies and report on their AI job be possible? Or those without I guess would be the important ones.

Based on your description of the system I feel that I, and probably others, are running some mod enemies without those jobs assigned. I wonder if that could be the cause of objective camping, that gets reported a lot for Yellow Alert Gameplay.

Although I see you've populated the arrays with quite a few mod-added enemies already.

So basically they're not 'additional' jobs made by LW - LW just created a system for managing the ValidChar arrays which is part of the pod jobs system becuase every mod that wanted to add enemies originally had to adjust that array manually and it rapidly descended into chaos. So they set up a system to do it through code, which appends the entries from JobListingAdditions, to ValidChar for each job which is much cleaner. I ported this (unintentionally tbf) in the pack, but once I noticed what it was doing, I figured I might as well try to make use of it. If you've manually adjusted XComAIJobs.ini to contain different things prior to this mod running, the code should still patch these units in the pack into the arrays (you may get some duplicate entries I guess but it doesn't really matter). If you don't want those changes to apply, you'll have to comment them out of my XComWOTC_AlienPack.ini file (or make a strong argument for me to remove them).

@LeyShade - I think there may be a bit of a misunderstanding here. The pod jobs and assignments are done in XComAIJobs.ini, not XComMissions.ini - that was an error on my part. You can see all the vanilla jobs in that file (which match my configs).

@BlackDog - We use a config fix that solves the issue directly because we don't use LW, by altering the base configuration via localised (non-Steam) install. Is it safe to simply remove this header and it's configuration from within the file if the effect is unwanted because a different system is used?

Also to clarify, we were asking about the jobs themselves, as we just didn't recognise those specific jobs. Thank you for clarifying their from LW and LWOTC respectively and can be ignored by those not using those overhauls.

@LeyShade - Pod jobs are part of the base-game pod movement system & AI. It's not a very well implemented system, but the basic idea is that pods are 'assigned' jobs at the start of the mission based on definitions in XComMissions.ini and there is an AI node in the unrevealed tree to say 'do my assigned job' (once activated, the job of that pod becomes irrelevant). If units have a job and are not engaged, some will hang around the objective, some will come and hunt XCOM, some will OW the evac / murder civilians etc. However, if units are not assigned to the 'allowed jobs' list, if a pod only contains those units, they will be given a 'default' job instead (usually basic patrol). Adjusting this can't be done cleanly using config so LW shipped a system to dynamically add things via a shell UISL. The effect is subtle but it should help with the objective-camping problem on protect the device missions and allow enemies in the pack to have slightly more varied AI when not revealed.

@Biggity Swigger - There is a weird bug that sometimes happens when cooking the mod (compressing assets to cut down the size) which causes this to happen. I'll rebuild it and upload a new version - usually that fixes it.

@BlackDog - Quick question mon ami. What are the Jobs listed in +JobListingAdditions of UIScreenListener_Shell_LWAlienPack from, as we don't recognise them at a glance.

advanced mutons are showing up as invisible with an error icon in my game, anything i can do to fix that?

@Nullified - I'm not planning on any futher enemy additions to the pack at this time - at the moment the plan is just for fixing egregious bugs and supporting mod-mod compatibility. Imo, the mod does what it set out to do (add the Long War of the Chosen enemies back into WOTC in a way which is compatible and balanced more around the base-game experience), reasonably well and I wouldn't want to compromise that in favour of adding more features and potentially breaking things for my ~20k subs (thanks all!). In any case, isn't the Andromedon Prime part of A Better Advent https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1126623381? You can run the two mods together if you want & if you want to customise which enemies are available you can also try this https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1782917748 , I don't think Boundir has integrated my enemies into the in-game menu yet, but you can customise your experience through modifying the config files as you need.

@ ♥ Chitai~ ♥ Hello, it is possible that the update was cooked against a custom version of Highlander instead of the latest stable. I've uploaded a new version today which incorporates a couple of other minor AI and ability fixes & is cooked against the latest stable, so please unsubscribe & resubscribe to the mod and see if that fixes the issue for you.

It appears the most recent update (Jan. 7-8) caused something to break, since I have been running this mod with my playthroughs, and attempting to load a save with the update is causing the game to crash. (Disabling this mod allows me to load in without crashing)

ANY PLANS TO ADD ANDROMEDON PRIME

Thanks for posting that - I've asked Boundir if he'll consider adding Mod Config Menu support for my aliens in his mod. If he doesn't want to do that, it might be possible for me to ship configs for choose my aliens as part of the mod and make an MCM item for it, but obviously it would then have its own in-game menu, and may (or may not) create a dependancy. It'd be far easier for integration to happen on the other side but we'll see how it pans out :)

Created a discussion topic to manually disable these aliens in the ChooseYourAliens mod
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/3005345170/4628106589631504017/

Thanks! That was more or less the exact design goal so I'm glad it's mostly behaving the way it was intended :)

i love more variety and challenge with advent's forces so this mod is very much welcome (i don't really care for the changes lw2 makes to the rest of the balance but the aliens are cool so having just the aliens was a godsend and now it's available for WOTC)

That's usually a problem with the cooking of the assets. I have to make a couple of minor adjustments to some localization this weekend so I'll make sure the mod's rebuilt properly when I do that.

For some reason Muton Centurion (Advanced Muton) broke for me after the last update.
Its invisible if it shows on missions.

Does anyone else have same problem?

Small note about ADVENT unit names.
Sometime ago their names were changed from LW original names to vanilla ranks for more consistency I assume (being ADVENT - Advanced - Elite). However in vanilla game only T1 units have ADVENT in their names (for example ADVENT trooper - Advanced trooper - Elite trooper), while units in this pack still keep ADVENT as the first word in their name.

I'm not really familiar with them either, but don't they require capturing aliens to convert to XCom's side? If so, having, for example, Najas to fight and potentially capture would be needed to get Naja soldiers. Still, no harm done if the template names don't match or whatever.

I doubt this would help in any way with those mods. From what I can tell those are specifically coded to the units included in the packs but I'm not an expert, I don't really use them.

Wait, will this make mods like the playable aliens and buildable units for LWOTC Be more usable in Vanilla WOTC?

Hi, the only items in the mod are the shield vest (granted from muton elite autopsy) and the dismantle drones tech/research, which grants a small amount of intel. Thanks for the kind words too folks :)

I really enjoyed my last playthrough with this mod! I was previously using ABA which is still good, but I think I now prefer this pack as my new base set of modded enemies.

Hi! Nice mod. I want ask you a favor: can you list the itens your mod adds? I note a persnal shield vest to build at day 1 but never research this.

I may also consider reducing drone stun to 3AP - so unit is disabled for one turn then only gets 1AP on the next. I think that might be more palatable, generally speaking for vanilla balance.

OK so, resuscitate is from the Requiem Legion mod & as far as I can tell, doesn't remove stunned. White flame from Mitzruti perk pack I believe *should* work but doesn't - I checked in testing this morning. I think because that ability just removes instances of mental damage, rather than explicitly removing the stunned status effect, it's not working correctly so I'll let Mitz know, a fix should be quite easy to implement. Stand By Me should 'definitely' work but it's weird - it sets the ability targetting range to 1.5 units (which is adjancent tiles + diagonals) but then puts an adjacency condition on the unit as well, which seems to chime with what you're saying about adjacency not inlcuding diagonals. It's hard to test bondmate abilities because of the weird way they're coded but if I get that ability in my latest campaign at some point I'll test it out & perhaps see if it can be adjusted in highlander or some other common fix mod, core collection or something like that.

Let me fall back.
It was my own fault for not reading ability text close enough.
The things I tried were Resuscitate (not sure if it's from vanilla medkit or added by a mod) which removes mental conditions but doesn't seem to work on stun.
And White Flame from psionic ex machina which says it removes mental ailments but also doesn't seem to work on stun either.
I also tried Stand By Me the bondmate perk. Didn't work, but I read that apparently the game doesn't diagonal squares as adjacent. So...
I still hate those drones but I guess this is more of a reading comprehension issue on my end then them being overpowered.