Pavonis Interactive Forums

Has their Vanilla cycles been altered somehow?

It used to be that as soon as the Vipers-Nest mission was over (with or without having killed that King)... they would re-appear pretty steadily within two weeks at most in any of the next (#2-3-4..5) missions.

Now in LW2..

-- On Rookie (without any particular Mods that would touch the scheduling systems, AFAIC), i just completed the Nest in the last week of September & BQ has yet to appear even once while i am already all the way through to mid-November. AK as usual has of course yet to follow up on her Kill.

-- I've got ONE secondary set of these two DLC "Investigation steps/POI" on the Geoscape but i haven't scanned them anyway. Would that flaw "stop" the intended Vanilla cycle or any alternate method used by LW2 in its place?

That's just weird. AND it completely breaks my GOTM achievement mod too since the overall timing is very important but more so if the RNG screws up the (expected or otherwise reasonably within some tight applicable limits) calendar conditions!

Any clarifications about this from Pavonis staff would be appreciated.

I'm not sure where to look to see if their cycles have been changed. Does this mean at what force levels they can first appear? Both the Berserker Queen and Archon King turned up in Troop Column missions for me. The Viper King died in his quest mission, so I can't say anything about him.

In my first game.. IIRC, BQ showed up in some AmbushMission too & AK followed twice -- Ambush again and then, last being at TheForge.

But you also may be right about some minimal Force-Level pre-requisites... my current game has yet to allow them to reach above #7 strengths anywhere while i've covered all 16 regions (many of which below #4FL). Can anyone at Pavonis confirm this assumption?

Zyxpsilon wrote: -- I've got ONE secondary set of these two DLC "Investigation steps/POI" on the Geoscape but i haven't scanned them anyway. Would that flaw "stop" the intended Vanilla cycle or any alternate method used by LW2 in its place?)

Protip: don't investigate it if the VK is deadand you're on ironman. He will not spawn and you will be stuck there forever unable to evac, forever fighting neonates like my little squad is. If they ever make it out of that damned cavern, they will all be master sergeants

So.. there *IS* a terrible flaw involved with having more than the unique DLC/POI instances. Must be a_nother buggy situation with their scheduling script then.

The POI spawn is bugged, yes. But that didn't stop the rulers appear like they are supposed to. I have a 2nd scan site for the nest sitting on the geoscape, but Queenie showed up on my second HQ-Assault. Just takes some time i guess.

I had the Nest POI spawn a second time, and did not scan or go on that mission. The Berserker Queen appeared just fine, but when I killed her, Bradford gave the "that's the last of them, three dead aliens, three corpses to research" (or whatever he said) and the Archon King never showed up.
The POI is still there. I did eventually go on that mission and force exit it with the endmission console command to see if that would help, but three months later and the Archon King still isn't showing up.
My guess is, if the POI is in place and you kill the second alien ruler, the third never appears, maybe? Perhaps because the game thinks that there already have been three (Viper, Berserker, and false Viper)? I dunno.