The Magic and Sparkles Positive Relations Mod

[Max_Caine]

This works with: V1.05HF

Hi guys, following a lovely discussion about setting up Positive Random Relations and us coming to the thought that "hey! this might be a swell idea!", I've got a tinkered-with strings and gameconfig file which has the most common form of ufo mission, the ground attack, randomly generate events which cause relations to go up. Ground attack missions will also produce negative events as normal but what goes down can now also go up.

This has been tested very, very basically. It needs way more testing and tweaking, and as it was a bunch of us that sat around and thought about it, I'd like to keep in the spirit of things and invite people to collaborate on this little mod to see if we can strike the right balance between negatives and positives.

Anyone interested on giving their thoughts?

Oh! Forgot the link. Because friendship IS magic!

EDIT: This will overwrite gameconfig.xml and strings.xml, so if you have mods already installed it may affect your game.

Edited June 16, 2014 by Max_Caine

[silencer]

By ground attack you mean the bombardment of a city? And those positive events, do you mean - aliens bombard Russia - USA likes that ?

[Max_Caine]

Hm, I need to work on my communication skills. UFO missions are split up into several mission types. The most common type of ufo missions are scout, research and ground attack. Ground attack missions generate minor ground events, such as "fishing fleet strafed" or "passenger train derailed". They can also generate airliner events, such as "squadron shot down" or "civilian airliner crashed". What he mod does is to turn the negative relations damage that minor ground events cause into positive relations, turning a minor ground event from a malus into a bonus. The events have been reworded to things like "Fishing fleet evades attack by alien craft. Fleet thankful for radio warning" or "Near miss by alien craft on local shopping mall. Basketball court obliterated" instead. Oh, and it does the same amount of positive relations as it previously did negative relations.

[KevinHann]

That doesn't make much sense unless it is within your radar radius and the UFOs are visible at all times when spawning the positive events

[kabill]

I'm going to do some theory-crafting. Feel free to ignore!

Thinking about the purpose of the mod, there's at least two ways it can go. Firstly, it's more or less flavour and adding some diversity into the UFO events. Secondly, it's a way of restructuring the funding system of the game. I think using the Ground Attack missions as a way of making funding go up is fine for the first function of the mod, but not the second. That's not necessarily a problem - it depends on what you want the mod for - but some thoughts on how the second might work:

The Problem:

The problem, for me anyway, is early game funding which more or less goes down without there being anything you can do about it. Ideally, for me, funding would fluctuate early game but remain more or less constant, and get increasingly towards the negative side as the game goes on. That way, you don't have the feeling of immediate doom, and the heavy-hitting comes on more gradually.

The (Proposed) Solution: There's two parts to the solution.

1) Divide land and sea events such that land events cause funding penalties and sea events give bonuses or have negligible impact. The in-game reason for this is that Xenonaut agents are providing data, tactical information and resources to funding nations to help them fend off UFO attacks. UFOs flying over seas is the game's representation of a successful defence, while when they're flying over land they've managed to enact a successful attack.

2) On aggregate, early game missions (i.e. Research Missions and to a lesser extent Air Superiority Missions) produce more or less balanced funding changes, while later missions (Ground Attack and Bombing Missions) cause more damage and give little or no bonus over seas. This should, ideally, start to tip funding towards negative impact as the game goes on.

This would need to be accompanied by a reduction in initial funding. On average, you seem to lose in the region of $500,000 in the first month, so setting funding at $500,000 less would seem to be a good amount.

Balancing the values for the events will obviously require some tweaking to get right. I think the Abduction events should be skewed to give more on a bonus than they do on a penalty, as sea events tend to be less common than land ones (so they'll need more to maintain parity). Air superiority events should give less in bonuses than they take in penalties. Ground attack missions should give only a small bonus (if any at all), although they could also have some air superiority events too. Bombing missions shouldn't give any bonuses and should possibly even apply penalties over seas.

E.g.:

Abduction: -15/+20

Airliner: -15/+10

Ground Attack: -30/+5

Bombing: -60/-20

Issues:

Balance issues aside, one problem is that it could be advantageous for the player to leave UFOs over the ocean rather than shooting them down. For most missions, I think this will be counteracted by the possible damage they can do over land, but research UFOs might be able to be 'farmed' for their relationship bonuses.

One possible solution to this is to integrate the funding mod with other changes to the geoscape game, including a dynamic invasion ticker which increases faster with UFOs flying overhead. That way, if you're 'farming' research mission UFOs, you're still paying the cost of additional ticker points so there's a penalty to it nonetheless.

So, there's the pitch. There's no reason, of course, why it has to be an either/or choice; there's room for many mods! I just wanted to articulate another possible way of using this idea in case anyone is interested.