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Feral Hive instead of the Lost [EXPERIMENTAL]
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War of the Chosen, Alien, Gameplay
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116.525 KB
Nov 29, 2023 @ 9:51am
Nov 29, 2023 @ 10:25am
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XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
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Malek Deneith
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Feral Hive instead of the Lost [EXPERIMENTAL]

Description
WHAT:
A config edit that makes feral hive chryssalids from The Hive mod spawn instead of the Lost. It also switches those spawns from eTeam_Lost to eTeam_One (more on why later) which means FACTION ANCHOR IS A HARD REQUIREMENT. Without it some missions might end before they normally would otherwise.

Also the sitrep description changes are a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥/meme placeholder because I have no idea what to put in there. If it bothers you delete the localization file.

WHY:
I had this dumb idea when people on modding server talked about Lost and nobody stopped me. And then I decided to share it here, because I know some people won't be able to help themselves and will subscribe even if it's a terrible idea.

IS IT BALANCED:


NO, BUT SERIOUSLY IS IT BALANCED:
Haven't had a moment to run this properly yet (only did a quick check to see if it works), but I imagine it won't be balanced. The methodology of picking what should spawn was to take the World War L lost spawn list and then replace entries there with Chryssalids of roughly similar durability. But Lost have much more granular HP progression, and are generally less dangerous so... yeah. On the flip side early missions might be easier because it'll be mostly Rippers spawning.

SPEAKING OF SPAWNING, WILL LIDS STILL SPAWN MORE OF THEMSELVES LIKE IN THE HIVE:
Yes. Didn't touch anything there. For that reason I suggest also installing WOTC without Lost spawns. I'm not making it a hard requirement, but it's strongly recommended, otherwise you might get swiftly overwhelmed.

WILL THEY SPAWN ADVENT-ALIGNED CHRYSSALIDS TOO:
Also yes. While there are some ways around this "problem" that I believe would work they are: a) beyond the scope of this mod and b) are likely not to be easy to cleanly implement as a workshop mod since it'd have to modify The Hive AI. As such you're stuck with 50% of spawns being in Advent team and hostile to ferals that spawned them.

Incidentally this is the reason why I switched these spawns to eTeam_One. If they stayed on eTeam_Lost all lids spawned by They Keep Coming would be hostile to them and that's just silly.

COMPATIBILITY:
Not compatible with anything that tries to replace Lost encounter lists or encounter definitions (things that add to encounter lists should be fine).

Any new missions/sitreps that use the default Lost encounter lists and definitions should change automatically, but anything that defines their own will still spawn Lost. Doubt there are many mods that do that, if any.

THANKS:
To everyone behind The Hive and Faction Anchor mods.
13 Comments
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LeyShade Jun 2 @ 6:54am 
@ Dragontoast - Lost targetting is defined by a seperate config in a different value, and affects all things on eTeam_Lost. That variable is 80:20 in the base game, to attacking XCom vs Anything Else.

That variable modified to a percentile where XCom is one faction out of X (X = Total number of factions in playthrough), the Lost, and anything on their team, will split their attacks between other factions, enemies and entities far more fairly, and according to their own situtational self-interest.

Changing the Lost to a team other than eTeam_Lost may also break things that require that team to be present, and will have no effect on preplaced encounters that place specific units on specific teams during tactical.
Malek Deneith  [author] May 19 @ 6:24am 
@Dragontoast - this sort of change would actually be somewhat clunky, since it'd cause Lost to be "allied" with other eTeam_One factions if both spawn. Which is mostly Hive and MOCX I think, but still...

That being said, it's been a while since my last campaign, but I could have sworn Lost didn't ignore eTeam_One or Two? Or maybe it's an AI thing, I use modded AI files so mine might be more unshackled.

As for uploading a mod like that - I hardly support the ones I already have on workshop, so I don't really feel like adding another one. But you could upload it yourself, Alternative Mod Uploader that's on workshop will let you do that without need for touching modding tools.
Dragontoast May 18 @ 12:30pm 
I edited the config to not change EncounterLists or Translations and exclusively change Lost spawns to eTeam_One from eTeam_TheLost.

This actually fixed an issue with the Lost faction ignoring raider factions like https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1774066942

Would you consider uploading a fork of this mod with just the Encounters.INI without the Resistance OPS Encounters segment?
It greatly enhances the Raider Factions and Lost interaction.
LeyShade Jan 11 @ 6:53pm 
@Malek Deneith - In theory, if there was an 'Advent Hive Beacon', you could then just set it as an equivalant ability in the AI so that you didn't need to really mess with the AI itself, and it would just use the ability instead of the original after swapping the two with use of a third mod =)
Malek Deneith  [author] Jan 11 @ 12:15am 
Yeah, I know, that was part of my personal solution :) The other was using AI to prevent Advent-Hive summons now that they'd always be a detriment. To give Advent-Hive a way to keep their current summon status while making Feral-Hive only summon ferals one would need to create second copies of the abilities that pull from their own list of encounter spawns. (Originally I thought you'd also need second copies of enemies but now that I think about it, it could be done by just adding the new abilities and then some AI work to dictate which gets picked based on unit team)
LeyShade Jan 10 @ 4:39pm 
@Malek Deneith - That's fair enough. Thank you for answering to preempt the next wave of Steam sale users doing so.

You can change the spawning of Advent AI teams by changing either team the encounter spawns to, or changing the encounter list the ability draws from for spawning.

For instance we rigged the Hive Queens call, like all other 'calls', 'beacons' and 'signals', to draw from an encounter list so they sometimes, mistakenly, attact the attention of those they didn't mean to :)

Thank you for answering the design questions, it's always good to understand why a person took the direction they did when making their art :)
Malek Deneith  [author] Jan 10 @ 5:34am 
@LeyShade

Yes, ELR should be able to handle this idea too, but at the time I wasn't using or even familiar with it, so I went about it the old fashioned way. If I ever do a clean-up of this mod I'll likely look into doing it ELR way, but for now it works and I'm on an XCOM cooldown period so to say, so it won't be happening soon.

As for AI, I actually were able to implement what I needed in my personal copy of this. The problem is that "what I needed" was removing ability of Advent-aligned Hive to summon at all. That is the limit of what can be done with AI and config edits here. And it is something that could be seen as unwanted change by players, hence it's not included in mod. To do anything better actual code would be required, and that was beyond my plans. Especially since the only solution I could "code" would be hacky as all hell.
LeyShade Jan 10 @ 3:30am 
Question: Why didn't you just use encounter list replacer and then it wouldn't be an issue?

Also, if you need assistance with editing the Hive AI, just ping us a DM with what you need and will see if can do it remotely for you over weeked =)
ScriptGenius12 Nov 30, 2023 @ 8:29am 
I mentally justify chryssalid infighting as them being from different hives.
Marcus Nov 30, 2023 @ 5:45am 
I play WITHOUT the lost, or TIMERS, and having tried this it makes a good change from the lost, so i shall carry on with it. I have removed all defence and dodge from them, and given them armour instead as i use a mod that gives more defence and dodge, the more armour pips you have.