Lots of good feedback from you guys. Let me dive in.
Final Mission: It is indeed slightly different for each faction. Won´t spoil how, but basically you encounter different enemy mixes depending on your own faction (easier for guard/Arbites than Sisters/Marines/GK).
Spiral Throne and Xeno Infection researches
Research hooks for fluff + Events + unlocking some sort of final GSC mission, whenever I get around to expanding the GSC implementation.
add promotion from Enforcer to Judge? (otherwise the 2x best Arbiter armors cannot be used by veteran Enforcers and so Judges are needed to be trained early on...and it would be nice as the Pardon is working for Long time service, maybe Enforcer to Judge after reaching veteran?)
Not sure on how fluffy this is, but I´m not against it, fairly easy to implement.
- Guard strategies lack codex entries. What is 'Scion' Strategy? Sorry, I am not that familiar with 40k.
There´s plenty of missing codex entries that needs writing up. Just haven´t gotten around to it.
- Also sister 'strategies'. Which are not currently strategies as they don't limit development. If they will stay that way, probably not call them strategies at all? Like "We currently have/Request help from Novices/Repentias/Superios/Dominions".
They do limit development, but mostly in subtle ways.
Novice strategy is the longer one, while SoB and Dominion shortens the early tech tree. Dominion Strategy also gives access to the special veteran sisters right away (and some other better techs).
They also have somewhat different craft access, and starter craft.
- Novitiate Sister Superior, Repentia Sister Superior and Sister Superior. Do these differ in any meaningful way? Looking in the codex I can't see the difference. Maybe it is in scripts though.
They are slightly different, but exist mainly for flavor with GWs own design decision (a bit of an issue in general, not in the mod: the Dogmata which is another similar unit).
Why they are in the mod: You get some to start with as Novice/Repentia strategy (their specific flavor) with different gear.
The Sister Superiors are in the promotion chain to the Canoness.
- Pilots can use honorguard armour.
Battle Sister pilots are technically just battle sisters, hence not as restricted as other pilots. Due to starting out with a bunch of them, for certain strategies where we don´t just want them switching over right away to power armor the current implementation is what it is. Less of an issue for later armors though.
- Repentia armour has really low energy recovery, especially for melee armor.
Good on spotting that, will be buffed.
- What is the point of repentia transformation? Free armour and that's it? Other sisters can use it as well. From lore perspective it is hard to say why convertion is necessary. Maybe repentance can be achieved after a single battle, and in a day there are again sins to atone for?
Again, fluff mainly. The more restricted repentia soldier type for the repentia strategy (again, to prevent them from just swapping to power armor right away). This restricted repentia armor does have some benefits over the other version though.
- Order Mechanicus though is a good candidate for transformation lorewize. It bugs me somewhat that every marine can wear mechanicus armour.
A vanilla 40k mod implementation, haven´t touched it but probably a good change to make for fluffiness.
- Generally amount of transformations seems too high. For example, award cantus armour? Does it really need a transformation?
These sort of upgrade transformations is generally to award specific equipment packs. The Cantus is not a new soldier type.
- Why manufacturing projects like requision inquisitor have byproducts? Piratez somehow manages without that. Also, some things like a free De'az bolter may be obsolete by endgame.
The game crashes if the manufacturing project do now have 1 byproduct, hence certain projects needing to give a purity seal or something else (this item can technically be "invisible" by making it like, adamantium or such.)
- Adeptas gravgun requies researching 5 different chaos gravguns, all of them. An overkill, probably? Found four, than edited the save.
Probably needs a research setup change to allow "one" of these to give the research access.
- Why do sniper rifles have limited aimed range? They won't be overpowered even if they were able to shoot across whole map. Armour poses a serious problem to them (and they are SLOW).
We prefer to keep [sniping meta] a little weaker, to expose snipers to some risk. The AI generally isn´t very good at dealing with this, as firing ranges are more limited for most weapons in this mod vs base x-com.
- Is it intended that enemies spawned on player turn via reaction fire or transformation immedially have TUs and can reaction fire? I believe it was not the case some versions ago (might be wrong though).
Some do, some do not. Summoned enemies that can´t act until "another turn" are very weak. Think of their danger as a replacement of just having a big damaging explosion from like a grenade.
- Restoration time. Apothecary is not nearly enough! Everyone has a ton HP! Grey Knights will resurrect their fallen faster then wait for healing! Or maybe it is just my problem.
Looking at a fix for this, maybe with a script to make recovery time dependent on % of health lost rather than a flat amount. Not an issue in base X-COM, but more so here with higher health pools.
Dodge mechanic proably warrants a separate post, but let's keep it here.
Dodge as currently implemented is highly RNG dependant. Sometimes it does not trigger at all, and another time I had a case when 3 sisters fired at a genestealer from 1 tile away, and did not hit it a single time (guess what happened next turn). Also busrts hit or miss in their eternity, be it 2 or 10 shots in a burst. My idea is to make dodge cost TUs. You can even make dodge guaranteed if enemy has enough TUs. But! If TUs go negative, they should carry to next turn, like webber script. That way if the genestealer from above example avoided 3 sister-turns of fire, it should at least not act on his next turn. Sorry if it is too complicated, I am a designer, not a scripter :-)
The issue with such dodge implementations (TU dependent) is that the AI doesn´t know how to use it. Instead Ive chosen to lower health/armor of these units vs what they were before (which was a crutch then due to not having a dodge mechanic).
Maybe in the future, with some sort of suppression script, one could lower % chance over repeated shots at the same enemy. But in effect, with random rolls you will land those hits if you fire 10 shots (aside for a rare few enemies, no unit has over 33% dodge).
Simi822: Looks like nice changes to Arbites. If you got the modifications saved and can share them I could update the mod files, as we haven´t focused much on Arbites.
