A cost for One Small favor. Hmm. There are a lot of ways that could be done. How about requesting the rare things you find along the way, or faction missions to get something particularly difficult. It seems that the big thing X-com has that the Program doesn't is manpower.

Those are good ideas. The Program really only has advanced tech and competency on their side. I could feasibly see them needing supplies, Elerium, and Intel, but rare items would be pretty cool and an interesting trade-off for the player to make.

Exactly! Some unique items are so good that you may not want to give them up. Sure, at first, they may ask for simple things like supplies (so simple, yet you always need more). However, they may later ask for the Bolt Caster for study, or one of the chosen's weapons. They may ask for something truely hard or increadable as well, like letting the Avatar Counter get full for a brief time to study the effect, or demanding you abandon a chosen assault, as they, for reasons unknown, want them alive. Another thing they may want is for you to "test" something dangerous, like a scanner that calls a large amount of Crysallids to your location, or a gene mod that may or may not be useful. Unlike them, your people are... expendable.

Totally not related to balance. This is the first time I'm taking these guys out for a spin but I wanted to post a screenshot. Operation Werewolf Challenge!
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1590207737

Not sure what you wanted by posting this. While I do appreciate the feedback, especially the pain point that happens when you can no longer level them up and can no longer view their perks, the entire point is that they're OP. You're describing a scenario that only exists 9 months into the game, at which point a guarenteed victory is often possible with XCOM or the Program.

I do believe that the interaction between Meld Induction and Triangulation to probably be a little much. I have removed Meld Induction in the next major patch.

If you were to suggest balancing means via the Strategy layer, since I believe "How expensive should a tactical victory be?" to be an interesting question, one that this mod indirectly asks, I would have more to discuss. I've always had plans to have XCOM have to pay some kind of cost, which you can see in posts further up. There's also the omnipresent idea that the Program should keep any material rewards gathered during the mission, such as Chosen or Ruler items.

Finally, I believe the difference between using the Program squad versus just marking the mission as complete to one of fun and thematics. If I just marked the mission as complete, it wouldn't have been nearly as interesting to me. Instead, I get to play around with making and using crazy units and abilities.

Also, many if not all of the 'synergies' you describe are actually hardcoded interactions, lol

Opprinnelig skrevet av Aleosiss:

If you were to suggest balancing means via the Strategy layer, since I believe "How expensive should a tactical victory be?" to be an interesting question, one that this mod indirectly asks, I would have more to discuss. I've always had plans to have XCOM have to pay some kind of cost, which you can see in posts further up. There's also the omnipresent idea that the Program should keep any material rewards gathered during the mission, such as Chosen or Ruler items.

A few months ago you might want to add, has anything happened there? Nope. Either way it wouldn't do much, it's DLC gear it was never necessary to begin with. It just means take them on missions that won't cost you much VIP missions, facilities, etc.

The requests was only one suggestion, and the costs could be a lot higher-- it's just a knob that I can tweak. For example, a heavy intel cost, a period of time spent researching.

Also, I'm having trouble understanding why winning a mission for free is actually even that valuable if you don't get any resources out of it. You would be heavily disincentivized to run facilities, for example, because if the Viper King shows up you are going to be missing out on his suit for the game (of course I could add conditions so you could not complete the mission successfully without killing him). If you were to only run missions where that is not as important such as Retaliations, I would need additional convincing that that is actually overpowered in the context of the entire campaign.

Geist himself seems a tad disappointing. For one thing, he had less health than some of his highest ranking cronies, and it didn't seem like he was anymore dangerous than them. From a lore perspective, this is fine. It's entirely possible that Geist just simply isn't that strong as a combat psionic, he could well be a leader rather than a fighter first and foremost. From a gameplay side of things, it felt a bit anti-climactic. Any thoughts on making him more of a great and terrible psionic warlord?


As an aside, I completely disagree with Reaver. If you install mods, balance is going to be affected. It's up to the player to tweak that balance to a level they personally enjoy, be it through more mods, ini changes or house rules. As it is, Rising Tides is a great feeling, well balanced addition to the game.

The only other note I have is that the Program squad is too weak to take on missions from the midgame in an ABA Beta Strike campaign (with slightly larger pods). I've tried doubling their damage and buffing their health, but they still struggle due to lack of manpower. Do you have any ideas as to simple changes I could do to make them able to compete again?

Geist is unfortunately a product of burnout. By the time that I was finishing up the High Coven mission, I really didn't have any fuel left to go forth and do Geist justice. He should have more HP than his cronies, though. If you look in the CharaterStats.ini, you should see that.

Honestly, the entire High Coven mission needs an overhaul, the whole thing suffers tremendously from burnout and lack of technical know-how. For example, there are supposed to be objective highlight camera pans and voiceovers to let you know where objectives are that I just never got working.

WRT the squad being too weak, can you give me some more information? Lack of manpower doesn't help me much. What level are they, in which month?

Huh. That's weird, I must have misread the health values.

Yeah, I completely understand the difficulty of making high quality missions. While all those additions would have been amazing, High Coven definitely works and is one of the highlights of my XCOM playthrough, thanks to the enemy variety. Despite his lack of stopping power, Geist even went out pretty spectacularly, recklessly charging across the battlefield whilst the other Templars played defense.

I stopped using the Program squad around force level ten, after a disastrous Guerilla Op in which I almost lost Nova (What happens if an operative dies?). Enemy pods were about 2 members larger than they would be in vanilla, and Beta Strike was active. Program Operatives were mid-rank, probably no higher than Cpt.

I think, the extreme time pressures of the mission combined with the increased difficulty of larger pods and ABA enemies were just too much in a campaign where I usually run eight man squads . I might go back to that save and see exactly why that mission was so frustrating. What sticks in my mind is lack of crowd control, but maybe I'd just built them wrong.

I tried panicking Nova on purpose with psionic feedback, as she had the perk that means it spreads to Over The Shoulder victims - but it didn't seem to work the way I planned, and she spent the rest of the mission hyperventilating.

Program operatives can't die, so there was no worry there.

At FL10 the Program is at gear level 2, so plasma tier. At Captain, the Program is probably at its weakest. At the next rank, a lot of really crazy perks start showing up.

I feel like you should be able to win before that if you have an optimal setup. It's also the case that I've never played such a heavily modified setup before with Beta Strike enabled, so I don't really know.

One thing no seems to be remarking on is that you are conveying the illusive and powerful “black suit” feeling very well. The Program never broke my suspension of disbelief while playing with them, and actually drew me more into the faction than the default 3 since there is more of a give and take relationship there. You want our guys? Do us favors. You want our best stuff? Hope you aren’t attached to Geist and his Templars. Sure they’re overpowered, but if you’re using one mod that’s designed to be overpowered and no mods designed to make you suffer, that’s on your head as well. Good job with the Program, hope you’re still working on it.

Opprinnelig skrevet av LooseNooseZeusMooseGooseJuice:

One thing no seems to be remarking on is that you are conveying the illusive and powerful “black suit” feeling very well. The Program never broke my suspension of disbelief while playing with them, and actually drew me more into the faction than the default 3 since there is more of a give and take relationship there. You want our guys? Do us favors. You want our best stuff? Hope you aren’t attached to Geist and his Templars. Sure they’re overpowered, but if you’re using one mod that’s designed to be overpowered and no mods designed to make you suffer, that’s on your head as well. Good job with the Program, hope you’re still working on it.

Thanks for your kind words. It's extremely gratifying to hear them; especially with regards to the mod's 'feel'.

Unfortunately, due to aforementioned burnout, the mod is not in active development. When mods like Strategy Overhaul and LWOTC go live on the Steam Workshop, I will come back and work on making the mod compatible with them. At that point, who knows-- maybe some new features might slip in!