A potential mistake?

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poseidon595
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2019 12:46 pm

A potential mistake?

Post by poseidon595 »

This isn't technically a bug, but it may be the cause of some serious issues nonetheless (also I don't know where else to put this). Its also possible this may be intention, if so I would like some feedback.

In the game files "XcomGameCore.ini" within the LW2 config files, there are four lines "SoldiersLostAlienHitChanceAdjustment=#" one for each difficulty. It was brought up on steam forums recently that the default values for the # was 100 in the public download of the game. This basically means that if an alien kills an XCOM soldier, all aliens get a 100% bonus to hitting another soldier as a result of that, if I'm understanding this correctly. If not, please correct me.

Simply put, this seems very wrong balance-wise, leading me to believe that this was not in fact intentional. Am I correct in assuming this was an oversight, or am I understanding this wrong?
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johnnylump
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Re: A potential mistake?

Post by johnnylump »

I had to dig into some code I haven't looked at in a few years, but the upshot is this:

The "SoldiersLostAlienHitChanceAdjustment" variable only has the power to turn a hit the aliens rolled into a miss. It can't create hits out of misses, no matter what the config settings are. It exists to (silently) help players bounce back from losses in vanilla.

The important conditional is in that function is "if(!bRolledResultIsAMiss && PlayerState.GetTeam() == 16)"

See XComGame => X2AbilityToHitCalc_StandardAim => InternalRollForAbilityHit, which in turn calls GetModifiedHitChanceForCurrentDifficulty, which holds the reference to the SoldiersLostAlienHitChanceAdjustment config variable.

By setting SoldiersLostAlienHitChanceAdjustment to 100, it only means that alien hits on XCOM will always be hits, regardless of how many soldiers XCOM has lost.

We turned off the setting because the vanilla way of handling it didn't work with the graze band mechanism we added.
poseidon595
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2019 12:46 pm

Re: A potential mistake?

Post by poseidon595 »

Thank you for the quick reply. I'll be sure to pass it on.
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