2019-07-16

AI changes
- General AI polishing. Nothing major, just some slight rearranging here and there.

Attrition
This update introduces some will draining effects for every Chosen. This is meant to represent the unique attrition that soldiers are facing when going up against one of the Elder's Chosen. Surely your guys are in a dire need of a vacation after that.
The three Chosen are each using a different approach to this: The Assassin deals a big whoop of Will Loss with only one charge, the Warlock gets to do it repeatedly during combat and the Hunter gets to do it during the non-engaged phase.
- Assassin: The Assassin drains 40 will points with her Blind Grenade. This was already in the mod.
- Warlock: The Warlock will drain 15 Will on any Mindscorch target. This of course can hit multiple targets in the later game when Mindscorch starts chaining around.
- Hunter: The Hunter drains 7 Will on any soldier that gets targeted by the Tracking Shot Mark.
These values can be adjusted in the ini files. If you are confused about what i am trying to accomplish here, read here.

Hunter changes
- Tracking Shot: In addition to the Will Loss mentioned above, there is also a debuff to Defense attached to the Tracking Shot Mark now. Whenever a soldier gets targeted by Tracking Shot Mark, he loses 7 defense for the rest of the mission. This can stack, so hurry up.
Again, the value of this debuff can be adjusted in the inis.

New Chosen traits
This update introduces three new Chosen Strengths. Two of those are fairly simple, improving the Chosen's survivability against situations where they are flanked and ganged up on.
- Resilience: The Chosen is near immune to critical hits. (Soldiers shooting at this Chosen gain -100 to their crit chance)
- Evasive: The Chosen is able to dodge incoming attacks (+50 dodge)
The third new Strength is a bit more involved and fundamentally changes how this Chosen behaves in combat, feeding back into the Chosen AI.
- Bloodlust: A Chosen with Bloodlust no longer has the "Keen" property that Chosen normally have, meaning that being lethally hit by the Chosen will no longer cause an automatic bleedout. This Chosen can kill your guys. And it knows it. As a result, the Chosen will use their primary weapon a lot more often, especially to fire off opportunistic shots (flanks, finishing off wounded soldiers).

2019-06-14

Chosen changes
- Chosen will now have a 50/50 chance by default to go for either kidnap or extraction when you fail to un-daze your soldiers. The Collectors Dark Event will make this chance 100%.
- Extracting a soldier's knowledge will now award the Chosen with 30 knowledge (up from 10)
- Capturing a soldier will now award the Chosen with 40 knowledge (up from 20)
- The "Priority Shots" behavior of Chosen, which handles jumping on excellent shots (like Flanks or shots on near dead soldiers) will now ignore civilians. This fixes the problem where Chosen on Haven Assaults would ignore XCOM and go murder civvies instead.

Warlock fixes
- Warlock no longer uses his shield ability on targets that are already shielded.

Hunter fixes
- His AI tree was overhauled completely and now uses different trees for his first and last action. This should make him behave a lot smarter, with doublemoving being the absolute exception.

Ability fixes
- Summon Spectral Zombies and Harbor Wave are now turn ending abilities. This fixes the problem where the Assassin would sometimes go Harborwave into Kidnap in a single turn.

Technical stuff
- The cooldowns for the new Warlock abilities have been exposed to the SoldierSkills.ini, in case someone wants to tweak them.

Other

- The SoldierSkills.ini now has a setting "ChosenArePrimes", by default it is set to false. If you set it to true, the Chosen gain Prime Reactions, meaning they take a bonus action every time they are hurt.
DISCLAIMER: I do not suggest actually using this, it is likely utterly unbalanced and/or dumb. I also didn't really test it much, so who even knows what will happen if you use this.
Basically, i gave you a big red button labeled "DO NOT PRESS". Your turn.

- GameData.ini has a line commented out. If one were to make that line active, it would activate a new Chosen Trait called "Bloodlust". A Chosen with the Bloodlust trait will no longer extract or kidnap, instead he will shoot at dazed soldiers with his primary weapon. Chosen with Bloodlust also do not cause the mandatory Bleedout that regular Chosen do.
DISCLAIMER: This line is commented out for a reason. I didn't have the time to test this thing yet. Chances are, there are bugs attached. I suggest waiting until i officially unlock it.

2019-10-19

Assassin balance:
Thanks to the AI upgrade, the Chosen Assassin was a bit too hard if you encountered her as your first Chosen. To compensate and make her a bit easier to deal with, her defensive stats have been lowered a bit, depending on the difficulty:
* HP nerfed from (12/15/22/27) to (10/13/18/23)
* Mobility nerfed from (12/12/15/15) to (10/11/12/13). Note that she still gets her massive movement bonus from Bending Reed on top whenever she uses the sword slice.
* Defense nerfed from (0/0/5/5) to (0/0/0/0)
* Dodge nerfed from (0/0/0/5) to (0/0/0/0)
* Armor nerfed from (0/0/0/1) to (0/0/0/0)
Numbers in brackets are the values for Rookie/Veteran/Commander/Legend.
This applies only to the very first tier of Assassin. Tier 2 to 4 of the Assassin are unchanged, so as soon she ranks up once, there's no further holding back.

Warlock AI update:
Sometimes, the Warlock did some ineffective or even stupid things with his new perks. The AI for those perks has been tightened up just a litte bit.
* Warlock no longer targets Lost with his Ammo Dump ability.
* Warlock no longer targets Lost with his Shield ability.
* Warlock no longer targets Militia soldiers with his Shield ability (wtf).
* Tweaked the target choice for the Shield ability further: Used to be strictly random. Is now still random, but if a Priest is on the field, the randomness will be skewed towards the Priest(s).