Pavonis Interactive Forums

1)
Drones are too powerful in the first few missions: the armor rating negates too much damage from xcom standard weapons, soaking damage from 3 or 4 shots too often. On missions where you are forced to infil only 4 or 5 on a team, that becomes unduly burdensome.
I suggest nerfing armor by at least 1 point of absorption.
In the meantime, anyone know where the location of that is in the config files, and how i might do it myself?

2)
Twice now, i have had a reinforcement pack teleport on top of me, no warning about reinforcements coming, and no animation of a dropship. I suspect this is a Bug.
In the meantime, does anyone know where i can nerf the reinforcement size? 3 seem much more reasonable. I could see it scaling up later, but in the first two weeks, reinforcements of 4 coming in right into your current firefight, seems crazy.

On Drones:

The File you are looking for is XComGameData_CharacterStats.ini (LW_Overhaul/Config)

Check lines 2834 and 2917, for example :
LWDroneM2
+CharacterBaseStats[eStat_ArmorMitigation]=2

I tend to use one frag grenade to shred the armour and do some damage, you can then finish it off in 1-2 shots. Combat Protocol (on a Specialist) kills outright a drone as well.

On Reinforcements:

I will need to look that up, but 4 is a manageable number. One Shinobi can Slash/Fleche the first, you can have an Assault get the second one (with Run and Gun if need be) and then Flashbang the remaining two if you do not have enough firepower. Rockets and grenades work best at the beginning since your soldiers tend to have terrible aim.

infidel901 wrote:2)
Twice now, i have had a reinforcement pack teleport on top of me, no warning about reinforcements coming, and no animation of a dropship. I suspect this is a Bug.

If you're playing on any difficulty above Rookie, you won't see the arrival flares. This is to make it harder to predict where they will arrive, and make it so you don't just slap down acid/fire/proximity mines/etc. on the flare to remove them the instant they arrive. As a rule of thumb, the AI will try to deploy where it thinks it can do the most damage to your team. If you have a group that's somewhat spread out and engaged on one front, they may drop right into the middle of you in order to disrupt you.

That said, the dropship animation not playing seems like it might be a bug.

Did any animation play? Did they teleport in from a portal, or was it just no animation at all?

No animation whatsoever.

I have seen this as well. No animation, just a noise like a teleporter or 'flash' sound, and there they are.

Just happened again, but this time, there was a psychic portal (purple) accompanying the teleportation. There was a sectoid, and 3 advent.

infidel901 wrote:Just happened again, but this time, there was a psychic portal (purple) accompanying the teleportation. There was a sectoid, and 3 advent.

This is intentional, at least. Only ADVENT forces have animations for deploying from dropships, so all alien forces arrive by the purple teleporter thingy instead.

A Better ADVENT made pretty extensive use of it.