To be honest, at the time of writing I think that reference was to Long War 2. XCOM 2 Siege is a recreation of a set of personal tweaks I'd made to XCOM: Enemy Within, at the time mostly repeating part of what the original Long War team had done. Come XCOM 2, I just went ahead and made my own standalone version using I think the same stats.

If there were other mods that do this at the time, I don't remember what those would have been. It's been two years :) Sorry for the uninformative response.

I like yours but I'd like to see how "better" the others are

I was wondering if you could direct me to these other better mods so I can see if what they have is something i want, tired of overwatch constantly missing mostly. You are taking a turn to prepare a shot, even a reaction shot should be more accurate not less.

BUG?

i got really lucky on my second mission. sectoid on a terror mission (i usually take my shinobi+4 snipers)
screenshot

( my previous screenshot )....same weird height disadvantage as positive (i most likely screwed up editing the EU aim rolls mod's ini file and should really have put a negative)
I'll edit the ini in that mod, see what happens. then remove that tweak and see if your bonus comes into play.
??

It's in the mod's description under "War of the Chosen compatibility." Short answer: yes.

wotc?

Thank you very much, that's enough ♥

The mod's so dirt simple that I don't know it's worth creating a standalone version, but you can do the change locally. Navigate to the Config folder listed in the description and delete the XComAI.ini file. That has the AI changes, getting rid of it will remove them. It won't break anything in the mod, it's far too simple for that :)

Could you make a non-AI-changing version of this? I'd prefer to keep the "A Better AI: Wotc" Mod. Am afraid of incompatibilities

nice, I was looking for something like this

Hey, no worries. I like discussing mods, especially my own :) It forces me to learn the various underlying systems better, plus I know the mods are being used.

interesting. thanks for the conversation.
heh. i'll wander off and bug the author of 'fatigue' because my gals aren't getting extra fatigue for a 56 turn "Shen's Last Gift" mission...and leave you in peace.
;-)

It's not a matter of load order. EU Aim Rolls overrides the entire standard aim mechanic and doesn't use the Vanilla stats for height advantage at all. My mod tweaks the vanilla height advantage, thus EU Aim Rolls is always going to take precedence. I just set it to -10 in the EU Aim Rolls config file on my side :)

1) unsubbed from EU aim rolls; loaded up the save game; your mod had the same "height disadvantage" wording for the modifier; obviously in hindsight it was never going to stack

2) now, the interesting thing is whether the default (once i resubscribe) values of EU aim roll - remember i said i'd tweaked the value beyond 0 - override your mod.
It definitely removed the bonus entirely...override or load order?

3) gonna try resubbing to your mod and see if the mythical load order actually exists...and NO...didn't work...still no modifier visible. So i'm still unconvinced load order is a thing in XCOM2 (as opposed to skyrim where it's definitely a thing)

in conclusion (i totally exhausted all testing) i agree with your warning. i'll need to modifier EU aim rolls to match your mod.

From a cursory examination of EU Aim Rolls, it looks like that mod overrides the vanilla settings with its own. There really isn't anything I can do about it... Well, there kind of is - I can attempt to tweak EU Aim Rolls' settings but I honestly don't want to do that. For one, it's a dirty hack which is going to depend on load order which I don't know how that's handled, for another it's trying to mess with other people's work.

For the time being, I'd suggest using EU Aim Rolls' config file to replicate the 10% defence bonus. I'll put a warning in the description.

i don't see your mods defense bonus. really tired. plan on resubscribing to your mod to see if the mythical load order helps. next i'll try disabling eu aim rolls in the launcher. first though: sleep

here's the corrected ini ...alright, so we know it'll stack using eu aim roll's config file. i've voided that bonus and let's see if yours shows up (it should, i assume, because we see your 50 defense for full cover in play...stands to reason we should see your height modifier appear naturally)

i'm assuming it'll be using the same name of modifier "disadvantage"

i got really lucky on my second mission. sectoid on a terror mission (i usually take my shinobi+4 snipers)
screenshot

( my previous screenshot )....same weird height disadvantage as positive (i most likely screwed up editing the EU aim rolls mod's ini file and should really have put a negative)
I'll edit the ini in that mod, see what happens. then remove that tweak and see if your bonus comes into play.

I see no reason why the bonuses won't stack. XCOM has never had issues with buff stacking. As long as the buffs come from different sources, they'll stack.

no no...don't bother. i have enough time on my hands, and Arma3's campaign is over, to deal with my wacky ideas.

btw, i did aim at an alien on higher ground (see image i'd linked earlier in comment section)...it's just that they won't have the perk will they?
Anyways, i'll see what i can do to figure it out.

Basically, my interest in this is (1) is this interest in defensive bonus redundant if the bonuses (for this mod, AND 'damn good ground') don't stack (2) if my sniper, on higher ground, and behind low cover gets both bonuses and raises the defense to 50...would i consider that overpowered?

So aim at an alien on high ground. It does happen occasionally :) But in the few instances that's happened to me, the mod doesn't seem to produce a Defence boost to the alien for being on high ground. It's entirely possible Firaxis discontinued that mechanic. There are quite a few in variables which are read but never used in the code.

Messing with to-hit calculations isn't trivial and I'm a bit overloaded with extant bullshit at work, but I'll try to make time and look through it.

i suppose i could always try and get a sniper with that perk mind controlled and then see what my other teammates can see when they 'try' to aim at that soldier.

ofc, but trying to figure out if your bonus and its stack is another issue. since you don't have aim bonus for height, it becomes problematic figuring it out.

Damn Good Ground is an Enemy Unknown perk :) It should offer +10 aim, +10 defence against enemies you have a height advantage on. Keep track of your aim breakdown. That should tell you what buffs and debuffs are involved.

not sure if it's in vanilla perk list, but the LWPP's sharpshooter has ...uhh...*rummage* "damned good ground"

@macelharen:
I'm not sure what you mean. What higher ground perk are we talking about? Do you mean the 10 extra defence for being on higher ground? If so, I'm not sure what you're trying to stack it with.

it works

finding it impossible to 'test' whether the higher ground perk stacks, for defense. how hard would it be for me to add in code to get a bonus to offense via higher ground? that way it could be possible to see if a perk stacks onto an ini bonus

The changes to the AI are fairly minor, restricted to the stats the game uses to calculate the value of cover. I'm not really sure what A Better Advent does, but you can probably check this on your end. Look into the Better Advent mod's Config folder, see if it contains an XComAI.ini file and see if the two lines in mine exist in there. You can always get rid of XComAI.ini in my mod if you're worried, that's where the two changes are.

this changes AI? Will that affect A better Advent??

looks fine from here. *removes redundant bonus from eu aim rolls* thx!

Done. High Ground should now offer 10 defence. Let me know if there are any issues with it.

Hah! That mod is literally what I was talking about :) It's a tweak to XComGameCore.ini to add

[XComGame.X2TacticalGameRuleset]
+UnitHeightDisadvantagePenalty=-10

So likely no - the two mods won't stack since they'll be adding the same line. I don't think it'll cause issues, but only one of the lines will be picked up by the actual class files.

Tell you what - why don't I go do that and push an update that I can't test easily, you tell me if it's working :)

wotc height advantage mod (the walls have ears. lol)

now, i'm actually curious as to whether (once you code it) your mod's height advantage mechanic stacks with EU's height advantage mechanic.

tell me about it. my jaw dropped while installing the sdk stuff just to change rank names

My mod-making will likely suffer while I'm still playing the game, as that sort of sucks up the majority of my time :) But I'm definitely adding a height disadvantage of 10% when I get the chance, sure. Truth be told, messing with ModBuddy and all the loading times is probably the most time-consuming bit of what is otherwise a dirt simple ini edit.

4 Sep @ 1:01am i make the change for defense to "[+]10"
then 3 hours ago i put up one picture of me shooting from higher elevation and the other picture of me shooting AT an enemy at higher elevation.

i didn't use the unit height disadvantage as much as add 10 to the eu aim mod's config file for defense at height.

I'm sure both versions will work the same =)
let me absolutely confirm i changed it to positive 10 instead of negative...*confirmed*

The point of all of this is it seems to me that the code for height disadvantage is in the game and functioning properly. All one wound need to do is uncomment "UnitHeightDisadvantagePenalty=-10" or add it to XComGameCore under [XComGame.X2TacticalGameRuleset]. I'll try to do that when I have some spare time.

OK, found something. DefaultGameCore.ini has a "UnitHeightDisadvantagePenalty=-10" setting, commented out so it doesn't do anything. This tells me two things. Firstly, yes - the aim penalty has to be a negative number for it BE a penalty else it's an aim buff. Secondly, the game already has this functionality, as I suspected. I did a little digging and tracked that down to the X2TacticalGameRuleset class, where it's simply defined but not used. Where that value is actually used is in the X2AbilityToHitCalc_StandardAim class, where it's called via some kind of macro I'm not familiar with:

X2TacticalGameRueleset is being used as a struct here, meant to hold data for classes to pull out of, and data for UnitHeightDisadvantagePenalty is being pulled from it when calculating hit chance AddModifier() itself tracks to the superclass - X2AbilityToHitCalc where it checks for a miss (via the weirdest switch/case I've ever seen), then does a bunch of things I'm really not sure I understand.

Your example confuses me somewhat. It lists "Height Disadvantage" as a bonus to-hit, rather than a penalty - enemies at a higher elevation would be easier to hit this way. Have you tried using negative values? Don't know if the game will accept that.

I'd admittedly completely forgotten we talked about this. The game's a bit too engrossing :) I'll try to find time to experiment with this, though. Still need to download the mod in question and look through the class files. Ideally, I'd like to find either the UnrealScript code or the ini value for height advantage, since I suspect Loke's mod has done a fair bit of extra work to get everything working.

tested. looks like a single floor of elevation (or higher) will give 100% of this bonus...for both enemies and allies.
example of offense ; example of defense

I'm at work right now so I can't check, but it does seem like height advantage defence is built into the engine already and simply set to 0. This should be doable. Should also be possible to add further elevation bonuses at more than 3 tiles high, though I don't plan on doing that.

EU aim mod ini file: [code]; ===Height advantage tweaks===
+HEIGHT_MODIFIER=(ZDiff=1, OffenseBonus=0, DefenseBonus=0)
+HEIGHT_MODIFIER=(ZDiff=3, OffenseBonus=20, DefenseBonus=0) ; LW2: Set OffenseBonus to 10
; These lines represents the default height advantage behaviour, height advantage over the max number of difference listed here will use the entry with the max number of difference
; Z difference in between will use the largest ZDiff that is smaller than the actual Z difference[/code]I'm tweaking the defense to 10 on the ZDiff=3 line. i wonder if that'll do it?

Loke's mod "This mod was discontinued long ago i cant say if it even works. " ~Loke
(last update june'16; loke was online 9 days ago; 186hrs for xcom2...nothing recent)

pretty sure he'll agree. i'll wait patiently, since my modding skills are woefully inadequate, atm.

If it's something as simple as "change X line in Y ini file, then sure." If it's something more substantial, though, I'd have to ask the original creator for permission.

i forgot to add a thought: do what any experienced webdesigner would do: steal code from the other mod. lol

Well, I will look into it. If it's simple, then yeah - that's definitely something I'd want to add to the mod as an ini tweak.

cool. thanks for the info. wish my skills were above n00blet when it came to modding. lol

Oh, adding defence against enemies on a higher elevation? Yeah, that might be a bit more complicated than the dirt simple ini tweaks in this mod. Unless the game has a variable for it set to 0 which I can change, it might be beyond my skills. I've sort of fallen out of the loop of UnrealScript editing these days, so I can't do very complicated things.