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ADVENT Pathfinders(Not LW2 Compatible)

This mod adds 2 new Advent aliens with 4 variants each, the Advent Pathfinders and Pathfinder Hunters. Kill them and use their corpses to get fancy new weapons and items for your dudes, you can also use their armor as cosmetics.

• Advent Pathfinders using Advent SMGs.
  
• Advent Pathfinder Hunters using new "Hunter Rifles."
  
• New Plasma Tech weapons for Advent, Advent Plasma SMG and Advent Plasma Hunter Rifle.
  
• New Hunter Rifle weapon for Xcom, Conventional, Magnetic and Plasma tier.
  
• Proximity Stun Mine Grenade.
  
• "Smart Scanner" item, confers flanking bonuses when activated.
  
• Ultralight vest that confers 3 mobility.
  
• Terror rounds that cause panic, you will need to kill the highest tier of Pathfinder Hunters to obtain them.

Hunter Rifles

Hunter rifles are a new weapon type, they "mark" targets when they hit with a debuff that increases crit damage, crit chance when flanking, and aim when flanking the marked target. Their damage covers the range between Assault Rifle to Sniper Rifle, 4 to 6 damage for the conventional tier and they are medium range weapons, they have negative aim at short range and at long range, but possitive aim bonuses at medium range, on top of that they confer higher aim by default. They can also use more attachments than other weapons.

They are set up as "assault rifles" which means that any soldier that can use assault rifles can use them, so perhaps they could help rookies be more than grenade throwers.

How to obtain them:

You don't start with Hunter Rifles, to obtain them first you must kill a Pathfinder Hunter and do his autopsy, once you do you will be able to make Conventional Hunter Rifles on Engineering, they are not single buy weapons, you need to make them individually, the magnetic and beam tier weapons become available with Magnetic and Beam assault rifles, here is when things get a bit iffy, since in Vanilla you cannot normally remove attachments, i made it so you can both make the magnetic and beam weapons individually, or you can choose to upgrade your existing hunter rifles, upgrading them keeps your attachments but it is a little more expensive than just making a magnetic one.

The negatives of this is that i suppose it can be a bit confusing(although i tried to make it obvious how it works) and that the icons are a bit messed up in the inventory, but i hope that's not a big deal.

Pathfinders and Pathfinder Hunters:

The Pathfinder is blazing fast and mobile, has a healthy amount of armor but relatively low health, so abilities that bypass armor are your friend. They don't deal much damage on their own given that they carry SMGs, but if combined with their Hunter big brother and flanking they can deal surprising amounts of damage. They will try to flank and be on your face.

The Pathfinder Hunter will try to stay away from you, they have high aim but they also have low damage. Their danger comes from their Hunter rifles, just like yours their rifles will mark you with a debuff making it easier for you to get hit and crit when flanked.

As the game advances both will become more dangerous, the Pathfinder obtains their smart scanner which makes them dangerous on their own as it will buff their flanking abilities, the Hunter will obtain the Proximity Stun Mine which means if he uses it, he will be able to disable multiple soldiers on his own.

Chosen Advent:

And finally the 4th tier of Advent, the "Chosen" Advent(name totally not taken from the expansion, except it is) use very powerful weapons, Advent Plasma, a tier higher than standard plasma weapons which makes them dangerous even without their items and support, however they also get new items, the Chosen Pathfinder obtains a better version of the Smart Scanner, and the Pathfinder Hunter obtains "Terror Rounds" which cause panic on anyone they hit, on top of debuffing them with their standard mark. Chosen Advent will show up at the same force level as Gatekeepers, so at the very very tail end of the game.

Of course, you can kill Chosen Advent and get their items, not their weapons however, scroll down to the FAQ section for more info on that.


None at the moment, except for some clipping here and there with the cloth on the Advent Armor. Let me know in the bug reporting thread if you find anything horrible.


Compatibility with RoboJumper's Xskin mod, once you reach Plasma Weapons, you will be able to use Advent's Plasma Weapons with Xskin, obviously you'll need LW's SMG pack to use the Advent Plasma SMG.

Not compatible with LW2.

Other than LW2 it should be compatible with everything, however, there has been no attempts to make it compatible with other alien mods at the moment, what does that mean? It means that if you use other alien mods with this it should work, these guys will likely show up and everything, but you wont see these guys following aliens from other mods and vice versa.

If you find any compatibility issues other than those, let me know.


Balancing. I tried to not go too crazy with the stats but maybe i did, so i will be listening to balancing concerns and complaints to see what to do to make them less hard/more hard depending on what's going on. Be sure to post in the balance thread below.

LW2 version, don't expect this anytime soon, i wont even start working on it until after a LW2 version for War of the Chosen exists, but it will exist and it will come with Laser and Coil versions for the Hunter Rifles.

Alien pack, see below in the FAQ for more info.


Advent Plasma for Xcom when!?
My plan is to make a variety of individual alien mods for Advent, each one adding a weapon for them, like the shotgun, cannon, sniper and so on. Each one of those mods will then have their own T4 Plasma version, once all of them are done, i plan to make an "Alien pack" mod with all of them, that mod will then come with an "Advanced Plasma" tech tier for Xcom, so, T4 Plasma. Of course, this will take a long time so don't expect it any time soon.

Laser and Coil Hunter Rifles?
Not in this version of the mod, they will come in the LW2 version of the mod. Like the above, don't expect it any time soon, i wont start work on it until after LW2 for War of the Chosen comes out. But it will exist at some point.

Compatibility with Spectrum/ABA2/Vanilla Alien mods?
Unlikely, maybe when i make the "alien pack" i mentioned above, but to be brutally honest i don't really feel like going through hundreds of aliens to make it compatible, that said if you want to make it compatible go right ahead, maybe it's relatively simple to just do it through .ini editing.

Can i edit X in the .inis?
Yes, i tried to make every possible thing imaginable configurable in the .inis. There are a lot of .ini files, but you'll probably want to look at AdventScout_WeaponData, Hunter_WeaponData, and GameData_CharacterStats. For the most part Xcom stuff is in Hunter_WeaponData and AdventScout_WeaponData has Advent stuff, although i believe the Xcom ProximityStunMine has some of its stats in AdventScout_WeaponData too.


You are free to use anything and everything in this mod for your own mods and/or purposes, in fact not only are you allowed, i encourage you to do it.


RoboJumper for helping me figure out how to get Stun Mines working.
xylthixlm(and RoboJumper again) for telling me how to fix a horror show going on with ability order when using Hunter Rifles.
Musashi for teaching me how to apply effects to Perks.
Shadow79 for helping me with Spawn weights stuff.


If you wish to keep up with early previews, updates or simply wish to support me in someway i have set up a Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/Claus

Thanks, and hope you enjoy.