@Jahsinha I would still run it. While the unit weights won't be hugely impactful (the main change being bringing Trooper types in line with ABA, which obviously matters less if ABA isn't there), this mod will allow enemies from those other mods to spawn in pods that have leaders from LWOTC Alien Pack. Without this, any pod led by a unit from LWOTC will never have followers from other mods I've supported.

On this run, out of these, I’m only using Black Dog’s LWOTC Alien Pack. I have a couple of your others, deleting the folders of what I don’t use. Does it really make sense here though? Will I get the benefit by just using this? ( I’m using Spectrum, Legion, Muton Enemy pack, and Praetorians)

@RustyDios Oh, well egg on my face then. Good to hear though!

That issue between the HIVE and ABA (and frost legion, and requiem) conflicting AI trees should be resolved as they both use unique character roots now.
I've used both mods for together and have not noticed any issues.

@LordDeTracy It's doesn't. Evidently, there is some conflict between the AI in ABA and The Hive that causes Hive units to frequently skip their turns and just scamper around. Sadly, fixing that (hell, even understanding the cause) is way beyond me.

On "The Hive" mod page, there is a ton of comments that says it doesnt play well at all with A Better Advent. Does this patch make them play nice?

@BlackDog Oh fair point about the followers lists. I'll go ahead and push an update with it live sometime next week when I start testing it.

Ah that's very nice to hear - I did try to be as sensitive as possible with the regular WOTC spawn weights but I'm not exactly an expert with these things! That said, one of the things I didn't do with the pack (yet) is added any of the other modded enemies to the 'supportedfollowers' lists which I think is why a couple of people were asking if I could see about getting this incorporated :)

@BlackDog It's the sort of mod that looks like it fits into the game pretty seamlessly, and it fills a hole since there are almost no modded archon enemies. Definitely going to play with it and get it added eventually. It'll probably happen in 1-2 months, and I'll be playing with a client-side version to test it out in my current campaign.

At a cursory glance, spawn rates are slightly high, but it's pretty close to base game values. If every mod were printed like this, I'd never have needed to make the mods. It's 'close enough' to my balance that there's no real urgency for me to get it added in.

Hello,

I recently released a port of the LW2/LWOTC Alien Pack for War of the Chosen (link below)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3005345170

I was wondering whether you would be interested in adding this overhaul to this ECP Pack at all?

If you'd like to discuss I'm around on the modding discord & would be happy to help with integration.

Steam did the same with me yesterday.. full unprompted xcom2 validation - including all mod settings .... so I feel you there! 500+ mods, about 30% with custom tweaks needed to be re-checked

I made sure to delete the folders of the mods I don't use, and commented them out from the required mods config folder etc to avoid the warnings. I was just wondering if removing unwanted units from the wanted mod's supported follower lists would be necessary or not.

I have since done so anyway, just to be safe. It's just that I've had to reconfigure all my mods due to some unknown issue with Steam or AML that resulted in my mod list reverting to base config settings. So I just wanted to make sure I wasn't potentially wasting my time.

Supported Followers should be fine... but having frost legion units in the "spawn distribution lists" would be an issue (this is why the mod recomends to delete the config/folder of any unit type you are not using)

I'm curious, since I don't use Frost Legion, can I just leave the Supported Followers lists as they are, or would I need to remove the units from the mods I don't use?

Yes to DAPBFL

Maybe to other enemy mods. Yes in that it shouldn't 'break' them, NO in that they won't have the same level of balance this tries to create

Also, does it play nice with enemy mods that aren't in the required mod list?

Would this work with diverse aliens by force level?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1969247728&searchtext=diversity

I just remembered i also got ambushed by cryssalids in a covert op and nothing spawned. But i don't know if it is this mods fault or more hive spawing that mission. P.S I am using the CI overhaul.

I am using all of the mods in this series but i think this one is not working as intended or is it? I get pods with rippers as followers (on 8 FL) and also get missions with the hive where just 3 crysalids spawned on the same FL. Just disabled it for now. Keep up the work though. Thanks for all the effort.

I agree, an in-game UI for setting and controlling the min-max FL and spawn weight of units would be good. I just don't feel that MCM is the mod that will be able to handle this.

And just to clarify what value I see in this particular mod, I think it could become a community-driven effort to create a MCM bridge mod managing all the most popular mods introducing new enemies, because I believe the issues pointed out by the mod author here about the differing "spawn weight philosophies" are real (and counter-productive in encouraging players like me to use these otherwise interesting custom mods).

There are too many use cases in which things could go wrong by tinkering with INI files (see PEBCAK), not to mention the tediousness of the operation for the average Workshop user, for this not to be properly done by experienced modders and exposed in a more user-friendly MCM.

If this cannot be done today, with this mod, it's okay. Beggars like me can't be choosers.

In any case, thank you for the reply and discussion ^.^

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@RustyDios Unless I'm mistaken, this mod seems to work just fine with MCM, and does exactly what I had envisioned and petitioned for below.

Again, please don't get me wrong. I'm not here to contest what highly experienced and talented modders like you say. I'm genuinely grateful to mod authors for sharing their creations as they come. I'm even more grateful if they take of their time to reply to comments to mine, and try to be helpful sharing their insight.

My goal is just to provide feedback as a mod user, to whom (and I believe many other people) this mod could be potentially extremely valuable, but in its current state is not.

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That sounds good.. but I don't think these mods can be made to utilise MCM. They need to make sweeping changes to the config files, and those changes need to be verified by a user for the exact mod setup they currently have. This is past the scope of MCM.

Your mods look highly desirable to me, and I would use them if they had MCMs. Could you be convinced to please add them ?

INI files are not significantly harder to toy with, but they have the significant downside for me in needing to be documented (so they're not forgotten when coming back to play XCOM2 after several months years like I am) and maintained on the player's side, to avoid issues when mods gets updates for example.

In any case, thanks for creating and sharing the mod(s) with us.

EDIT : As far as I'm concerned, no need to be highly granular in the exceptions either. I will probably either want to use 100% of an alien mod or 0%.

Thank you @RustyDios. That clears it up.

PS : I feel like I opened a pandora's box with the B&T stuf lol. Just joined the Discord server and trying to figure out what is what.

ECP's with lwotc + Mod Jam ... possibly won't work

LWotC has a completely different system for determining pods.
Alot of the work in this mod is already 'rebalanced' in Mod Jam itself .. for the rest of it you'll need the "Blood and Tears" collection from the LWOTC Discord for the 'same' style effect that the ECP's bring for non-LWotC players ... ...

Thanx for the reply, that was helpful.

Sooo, doublechecking... I can use ECP's with lwotc + Mod Jam, without the base ABA mod or any other enemy mod I don't wanna include?

Usually the interesting mods always have some comments in the comments section that a persons asks if it is lwotc compatible, but searching on ECP's comments I couldn't find any. I hope I 'm not annoying you too much, it's just that I am very interested in what your mods do :)

@Kill_the_hippy Sorry about the late response. The warnings are gonna' be there if you have my mods without the dependencies, but as long as you've edited my .ini's and disabled the encounter lists the would spawn those dependencies, you're all good.

I think the 2nd part of your question is if you need the unused mods installed? If that's the case, then no, you don't.

Also, I 'm playing with lwotc and I see a lot of these enemy mods being incompatible, so I would think that I shouldn't probably have them to begin with.

Can you please clarify something, if you can, so I don't have to find out the hard way?

For the second method of disabling mods I don't use, do I have to have the required mod installed or is it fine to just delete the EncounterLists.ini w/o installing these mods and ignore the red warning about missing mods at the start of the game?
(Just using Bio Division from this compatibility patch).

Just finished a campaign with about 685 mods, this one included, and had no major issues! Thanks for putting this up.

@Terran in the future I will likely update these mods to include more enemy packs and preconfigured Choose Your Own Aliens files, but for the time being, I'm not willing to take on the work of integrating more aliens. Just need a break from staring at encounter lists for a bit.

Is it possible to include this mod too [WOTC] Advent Purge Unit?

@Zarkil Nope, I don't have that mod on, and I think they had Frost droids, so I believe it was Frost Legion

@Rather Incoherent No problem, I've melted my brain many times modding this game :) Thank you for this amazing mod. I've never run more than two of these mods together but now I want to try all 4 even though I know it will drive me crazy! Maybe I'll throw in psi ops, elders, and pathfinders to make sure of it :)

@Zarkil Whoops. Sorry, my brain's a bit melted from re-organizing the mod and rewriting all the old encounter table removals to try to fix some other issues. My bad.

@Rather Incoherent I was asking Saelac[ßŦ] because A Better DLC includes cryo priests and I believe it also includes the guys he's describing but I thought he might not realize it wasn't covered by your mod.

I don't run A Better DLC, but as most spawn weights are balanced around ABA as the core, it would probably go almost totally unchanged if I did include it.

@Saelac[ßŦ] do you have ABA: Better DLC installed?

@Saelac[ßŦ] That's very strange. I certainly didn't add Frost Legion as followers to Hive Chyrssalids or to any specific Hive Sitreps, so I don't know why that would be happening.

Does this intrude on Feral Hive sitreps? Had like frost legion I think spawn in as the Hive and attacking the normal Advent spawns, no chrysallids. It was interesting watching a bunch of advent guys fighting each other and a Chosen though.

Just experienced the "early bug hunt has ABA chryssalids" and honestly the only explanation I can think of is the game not applying the changes to one mod's configs made via another mod. Which is actually something I run into several times recently, like for example Field Support Officer class wasn't changing Denmother's class properly, had to go to original mod's config and change the setting by hand. And that wasn't the only situation like this.

I'm worried this might run deeper than just bug hunt and I think it might be prudent to keep an eye on missions with enemies who's weight you've changed, and checking Launch.log afterwards. You run DABFL so the log will have report of what was rolled *using what weight* which in turn would allow for confirmation if other edits are actually getting applied or not.

@Dies Irae Honestly I agree with that.

I don't think aba chrysalids showing up on one particular mission is an issue. Adds flavour

@Rather Incoherent - I've got most of these done for the stuff on workshop if you'd like batch copies of things to work from that might save you time on your own work =)

@Krakenous All thanks to RustyDios!

Yay for lovely formatting and tags hehe. Nice one!

It will 100% work with DABFL and I use it alongside these changes myself. There are no recommended settings though. Just use DABFL however you previously used it, and all of these changes will be taken into account just like the base game spawning/reinforcements would.

Absolutely outstanding! THANK YOU!