Editing the Hacking stat

[The Boz]

I wanted to edit the Hacking stat of all troopers so that Specialist stop being a must-bring on hack missions, but I can't seem to get it to work predictably. Where is the base soldier hacking stat located? I found the one for basic Sparks, and I found the ones for soldier class gains per level, but the results are... inconsistent.
I have edited these values to match those of Specialists in each tier, but in-game the Hacking stats vary wildly among troops of the same rank. I have neither of the random soldier options enabled.

[Krzysztof z Bagien]

In XComGameData_CharacterStats.ini, you can add something like CharacterBaseStats[eStat_Hacking]=X (where X is how higher you want hacking to be) to soldier template; it's in the first lines, [Soldier X2CharacterTemplate] is general template, and below are difficulty variants.
Adding (StatType=eStat_Hacking,StatAmount=X) at squaddie rank to every character progression in XComClassData.ini should do the same.

I think it may not work for any soldier already in game, only for new ones.

[The Boz]

Thanks!

I think it may not work for any soldier already in game, only for new ones.

This... might explain why they're so inconsistent... Any remedy for that?

[Krzysztof z Bagien]

I guess you would have to edit a save file somehow (there are some tools to do that, but I've never used them), and I think there's a mod that allows editing soldiers stats.
Alternatively, you can just start a new campaign

Edit: you can also try some console commands, eg. there's one to change a soldier class (it resets his rank to squaddie), it might work like new promotion and apply stat bonus; and there's also a command to set soldier stats to whatever you like. I don't know if they work with LW2 (or at all TBH) though.