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[WOTC] LordAbizi's Battlefield Leadership Training

Originally posted by Exodus 18, 21:

But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens

This mod is the spiritual successor of the "day-1" Leader Training mod by Pavonis. However, this mod is not merely a port, it is a complete redesign, made to be integrated with the features of War Of The Chosen, and built with this author's philosophy.

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The LW1 Officer system is one of this author's favorite mechanics. The "day-1" Leader mod by Pavonis sort of ported it into XCOM2, but this mod was never really ported into WOTC (there is a port by Ginger, but this port served some very specific purpose and is not really playable, to the best of the author's knowledge). At some point Iridar wanted to make such a mod, but eventually did not release the mod. A year ago, the author has released his first mod, the Battlefield Tactician, which scratched that itch for the author for a while, but as our experience grew, we came to realize that a full officer training mod, in the style of XCOM LW or LW2 is within our abilities. As a result, this mod was created. This mod is not a direct port of the Leader pack, but it is built from zero (of course, reusing some the ideas), and is made to tie officers into various systems of the game, making them feel like an organic part of the game.

Those familiar with the LWOTC Officer system/LW officers/Leader pack will know how this works. The player builds a GTS upgrade, and this allows slotting soldiers into training. This training has its own skill tree. With more experience, additional training for this soldier will be unlocked. Each training has its own requirements: a soldier rank requirement, a mission requirement for the soldier, some GTS unlocks, and the training itself costs AP. For the full list of features, please see the appendices. Each training level provides one ability to be chosen from two, and some other abilities that will be granted for free. This last bit is morally inspired by shiremct's celebrated Proficiency Class Pack. For more information on the ability tree, and other interactions this mod has with other game systems, please see the appendices. Appendix A is a detailed overview of the abilities introduced by this mod. Appendix B explains what are the requirements for officer training. Appendix C lists briefly all the features and optional features introduced by this mod.

Is this balanced?
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But seriously,
Officers do get a lot of additional abilities. Most of these abilities are passive supportive abilities, not something flashy that allows the officer to solo a mission, this is not the intention. Since this is made to be compatible with more or less all classes, we do not take any responsibility for OP broken stuff the reader might generate. The officer, on its own, gains very little power benefit from this training, but the upper bound for the benefits that can be reaped from this system is entirely up to the player's mod setup and creativity. In addition, some limiting factor on the power of officers is all the strategic gates that are imposed on this system, that make it harder to train officers.

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The author has made an extensive effort to make this mod as configurable as possible, within the limits of reason. In principle, it is possible to scrap the entire "officer" flavor of this mod, and reconfig it to be a "pistol training school", or "alien hunter school", or whatever, all with configs only! It is also possible to allow certain classes to count as officers without needing to go through training for some of the mechanics of this mod. It's also possible to ban some soldiers from training, based on some logic. If there is a particular thing that a reader whishes to be exposed to config, let us know, but be aware that not all things can be made configurable easily. See the appendices for the full lists of features, which also include information on which parts are open to configuration.

XComGameData_SoldierSkills - officer abilities tweaking. Any green number in an officer ability is something that can be tweaked.
XComGameData - can tweak the details concerning the new Chosen sabotage introduced in this mod.
XComAbiziOTS - officer training gates, officer ability tree, forcing officers on certain missions, on infils, on covert ops. Allows compatibility with other mods, by banning officer training based on some conditions, and by allowing to identify soldiers as officers for the purpose of officer requirements given some conditions.
XComStrategyTuning - facility upgrade costs and gts unlock costs.
XComClassData - controls who can get the Born To Lead ability.
XComGameCore - Controls the negative trait, Mistrust of Authority.

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This mod was designed and tested with Covert Infiltration, but should apply to normal WOTC.
It will absolutely not work in vanilla XCOM2, and there's no point asking.
Incompatible with LWOTC because reasons.
This mod is also not compatible with XCOM:EW-LW, or LWR.

Other than that, this mod should work with all classes. Even modded characters like Torque can be trained as officers.

Includes built-in support for Iridar's rank replacer, this will give the officers from this mod custom officer ranks, although this mod also introduces its own custom rank names for officers.

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Highlander, obviously.
Rusty's DSL is technically optional. Using it will mark the officers in the roster. Using it will enforce a "one officer per squad" functionality, which can be turned off in the configs.
Compact Perks For Armory helps with seeing detailed descriptions of the newly trained officer abilities in the barracks before deploying on a mission. This is the only way to possibly see the ability tree that's hidden inside one of the ability descriptions.
Mitzruti Perk Pack - two abilities are used from there.
Denmother mod - two abilities are used from there, and some icons. You can just let Denmother die on the first retal and this way you won't get any other functionality from that mod, if you don't like it.

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See Appendix D.

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The author is DELIGHTED to thank the following for their involvement in this project. In no particular order:
Xymanek, Iridar, robojumper, RustyDios, h4ilst0rm, Tepa, Zelfana, BlackDog - for very useful discussions and helpful comments and hints that pointed me to the right directions, provided enlightening examples, and in general were very willing to help.
Mitzruti, shiremct, Favid - for using their various modded abilities as reference to help build some of the various officer abilities.
TeslaRage, RealityMachina, Kyuubicle - for the Soldier Conditioning, Mec Trooper Augmentation, and Psionics Overhaul mods, which I used as references for the entire "add a staff slot to train a soldier" workflow code.
MrCloista, deaconivory, Stukov81, Firebrand, SOPHIA, PowerGirl - for being brave people who were willing to test this mod in their games during its development, and discovering many good bugs that I was able to correct.
The author acknowledges team Pavonis for the inspiration for many of the ideas of this mod, dating back to LW1 days. Some ability icons were taken from Pavonis' original assets.
The mod preview image was made with the help of an AI.
As usual, the author is grateful to the members of the MEME Discord.