Really looking forward to trying these out.

Just my first impressions from trying out all three of the Second Wave options together. I realize things may work differently with a different combination but I wanted to try all three on default settings to get a feel for the whole situation. These are just observations, not intended to come across as harsh criticism. I really do enjoy that these are available and I plan to keep experimenting.

---

Specialization Roulette: Having one class/specialization chosen at random and being able to choose the other two feels good. It gives you a little bit of a 'this soldier has a mind of their own' feel while still allowing you to dictate the other classes for skill synergy, especially for the classes like Valkyrie or Warden that rely on multiple rows to provide a wider range of class-specific perks to really cement that soldier's role on the team. I may experiment with setting up a max of 4 available specializations rather than the default 3 just for options, and the existing menu accommodates 4 rows perfectly, so that would be a good fit.

Commander's Choice: As I wrote above, I feel like Spec Roulette and CC work very well together. Not much more to add. I will say though, I almost certainly won't play without CC, because the option to choose certain specific things for those multi-row specs is pretty critical for making some classes work decently. Without the option to choose, you can end up getting an assortment of non-synergizing specs where you're locked out of many perks because randomization didn't provide the spec with a critical prerequisite (like Gun Fu's Dual Weapon Specialization, for example, more about that below). I'd say, even if you lessen the number of specs available to CC, definitely ensure that you keep the option to pick one of your choosing to account for harsh randomization.

Training Roulette: I personally noticed a few cases of a prereq coming after the perk that required it due to roulette randomization. (The worst offender here was the sub-row of Gun Fu, "Scrapper," which requires Gun-Fu's Dual Weapon Specialization perk for a full five of its perks) Obviously I could pick other perks while I wait to access the prerequisite, then go back to pick up the others but it would feel smoother I think, if they appeared in the proper progression, even when the rest of the spec row was randomized. And if you didn't have Commander's Choice active, got Scrapper without access to the Dual Weapon perk from the Gun Fu row, and the only two perks available without that prereq had been randomly placed at Colonel and Brigadier, it would feel like a very pointless spec to have for the vast majority of this unfortunate soldier's career, which would almost certainly prompt people to use console commands to rebuild.

The Menu: Unless you're intimately familiar with the full assortment of perks available to a specialization, the spec-choosing screen simply doesn't share enough info to make informed choices beyond the single paragraph of flavor text that only vaguely hints at a spec's capabilities. And you're unable to view the perk rows to check on things until you commit. I know it wouldn't be as thematic as having the flavor text, but frankly, if I had to choose, I'd prefer if the flavor text were simply replaced by a list of which perks were available to each spec under each title on the spec-choosing screen, even if the order was different due to roulette randomization. Making informed choices is just too important to me. I'm sure there are other folks who feel the same. Yes, you can alt-tab out to consult the various mod pages, but I'm a firm believer in in-game menus providing every morsel of info that a player may need, rather than having to cross reference multiple sources outside the game to make decisions.

---

Again, I hope this doesn't seem too critical, I love this kind of stuff and plan to keep tweaking settings on my end, this is just my personal feedback. Thanks so much for all the work you and your team have put into this overhaul and so many other amazing projects, Musashi!

Thank you for your feedback. Defenitly take this into consideration.
Will have a look at the prerequisities of the akimbo specs.

Excellent mix up to an already superb mod. Is it possible add a commanders choice for innate abilities?

Currently working on it ;) @DoctorHue

*Slow claps with amazement*
Wonderful extension for the already customizable base mod game play.
*Insert motivating praise here*

One minor tweak I'd like to see is the option to have one or more randomly selected squaddie abilities whilst also allowing you to select one or more via commander's choice.

This could allow a setup where your soldier is assigned, say, two to three random specializations and one random ability, and you then pick one specialization and one ability to go with them.

@Musashi

1.) [RPGO] Commanders Choice is absolutely amazing, thank you for implementing this. I used to manually respec squaddie abilities as I usually have a theme for each soldier, but now I can do it in an officially supported way. This change also makes it a bit less scary to add more trees due to promotion screen clutter.

2.) To echo what everyone else is already saying, it would be neat if there was a way to preview the trees.

3.) A potential bug I noticed:

I've increased the amount of squaddie abilities that are gained from 2 to 3, and it seems like all 3 abilities are given, but only first 2 abilities are "learned", requiring you to manually learn the third ability (it still costs 0 so it's no big deal).

To illustrate if I'm unclear:
https://i.imgur.com/7a19KWd.png

4.) As a flexibility suggestion, might I add that it would be nice to have an option where Commanders Choice is not a "hard" value. Right now, you *must* pick 2 abilities and you *must* pick 3 trees, before "Continue" button is available.

Often times I find myself wanting characters that are a bit more flexible than that. For example, only 1 squaddie ability but 4 trees, while the next soldier might have 3 abilities that fit their character, but only 2 ability trees.

So for example, the config could dictate a minimum and maximum amount of each, where "Continue" becomes active after picking >= minimum and the left menu is disabled when hitting max like it is now.

If the desired default behavior of [RPGO] Commanders Choice is as it is now, the default config would just be set to the same min and max values.

Trying the new Commanders Choice, I picked Prodigy and Synthetic Genes starting abilities and their Combat intelligence and Natural aptitude levels remained the same in stats.

Alrigh thanks guys i will have a look at the issues asap.

the problems with the starting abilities should be fixed by the last update.
next up is showing preview trees and starting abilities on the choose spec screen.

I mentioned this out on the main comments section, but it would be nice if we could just zero out the CommandersChoiceSpecCount line and just have it skip the part were you choose specs, and just load all of them instead. I like the ability that CC gives you to pick the starting perks, as I currently manually set them for each character, but I still want to be able to have the full list of classes to pick perks from.

I really like this mod. But im curious if you could add and alternative to the commanders choice. Instead of having a choice from all the specs and abilities, maybe have a selection of a a few maybe like 6-9 or so specs and abilities...

Otherwise great extra little addition to the mod!

Will put it on the list of improvements @endersblade @AcidLines

Here's something that just occurred to me, considering the new second wave options:

There are some third party specializations such as the biotic and warden specializations, where the first available skill after squaddie is a skill to unlock the rest of the specialization, but by itself the skill doesn't do anything (some other specializations like templar, akimbo, and skirmisher also have rank 2 unlocker skills, but those at least serve an obvious function). I guess you can argue that the biotic specialization ones are optional, but that's beside the point. With the warden and akimbo specializations, one of the trees is useless without the unlocker skill. So if you want the totally dependent one, you must have the other as well.

What I'm getting at is this: would there be a way for people to now change those mods so that, if picking specializations through the second wave options, they get these unlocker skills added to the squaddie rank? So, if for whatever reason you wanted the second tree under the warden specialization but not the first, you are granted ebb and flow as a default skill regardless of which tree you pick.
Of course, this would push the whole tree up one rank (bringing the skills back to where they were in the tree in the original mods). It wouldn't be a huge deal if a tree ends at colonel rank for those specializations, though, it would just leave the last column empty. I know it would probably require a whole separate "give skill at rank X with stat increases Y and Z" but that's a different issue.

At the least, could the unlocker skill be added to both trees so that, say, if I only wanted the melee skills for the akimbo class but not the dual pistol skills, then I could do that. Just curious if that's something that could be done.

Anyway, thanks for the hard work on this mod. It's one of my favorites!