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Medals/Promotions give more bravery


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So most soldiers starts with very low bravery and raising it is difficulty, what leads to, sometimes, big morales widespread collapse causing a truly team breakup and, frequently, resulting in an irreversive lost of the battle (like when half of you team panick/bezerk/flee just because only one soldier is killed and the aliens got a full turn to wipe them out, leading to more widespread breakouts in the following turn).

Although I like to having to work team morale, like not leaving soldiers alone and putting high officers with provateers, sometimes it seems very unbalanced. So to improve it a bit, can Medals and Promotions give more bravery? For Medals, that +1 bravery seems very low to an awarded soldier. Maybe +5 would be best? Or at least +3. And I think promotions should also give more bravery. So at least you can trust more you seasoned soldier to dont take part in the "team breakups".

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I do like the idea of this change. It's very hard to level bravery - most other stats go up 1/mission, while bravery barely ever increases and even if it does, odds are it's the soldiers with the lowest bravery which increase since those with higher bravery are less likely to panic. Across 30 missoins, a soldier would probably gain around +20 in most stats (aim and strength certainly, maybe health more for TUs), So give there's 10 medals, and given that some of them are quite situational, a buff of +2 or +3 bravery per medal seems reasonable to allow bravery to increase in line with other stats across a game.

Doing this would also help give the player something they can do about psionics. At the moment, ironically, it's probably better to send less good soldiers against the high-level ships since weaker soldiers will be less likely to kill their comrades (less good at shooting!) and also be worth less if they get killed. That kind of feels opposite to what should be the case.

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I stayed out of this debate last time, as it was getting rather heated. But I'll stick my two cents in this time.

Definitely agree medal effects should be increased. Right now high-level officers do not show enough of a bravery differential vs. low-level grunts. A guy that's survived 30,40,50 combat missions should no longer be primarily associated with his baseline bravery. He's a hardened veteran that's seen plenty of death and destruction by now, and his stats should reflect that. It should be considerably more difficult for psionic attacks to affect him (vs. inexperienced troops) as his morale should be significantly higher.

Instituting such changes would affect game balance, though. High bravery/morale officers would be correspondingly more immune to psionic attacks then they are now. Is this the objective? Or is it to increase the resistance of high-level troops vs. low-level ones, more accurately reflecting the benefits of prolonged service? If so, and if you want the aliens to still be punching at the same weight, you'd need to increase psionic strength, too. Which would make low-and-mid-level soldiers more susceptible. Unless you only increased the psi strength of higher-level aliens (caesan leaders and praetors). Or made the medals buffs more pronounced for the ones that are harder to get (say, +1 (beyond current levels) for the 10-mission medal, but +3 for the 20-mission medal).

There's a lot of cross-related effects that would need to be considered with changing the existing system...

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I would just prefer to see bravery have a different levelling mechanic instead of relying on the soldier panicking.

Now that morale is used as part of the psi power success calculation maybe making a psi roll could contribute a small amount towards a bravery increase, pass or fail.

Failing may give a bigger bonus to help bring those lower bravery soldiers up faster.

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I would just prefer to see bravery have a different levelling mechanic instead of relying on the soldier panicking.

Now that morale is used as part of the psi power success calculation maybe making a psi roll could contribute a small amount towards a bravery increase, pass or fail.

Failing may give a bigger bonus to help bring those lower bravery soldiers up faster.

In principle I'd agree. The fact that something bad has to happen for you to improve it puts bravery very much out of step* with other stats. Really, I'd argue that you should gain bravery for being subject to, or passing, a morale/psi check instead.

However, at this stage, attaching bravery increases more heavily to medals might be a more practicable solution (if, indeed, it's accepted as a problem).

*It's kind of like gaining reflexes by failing a reaction check, or gaining accuracy by missing a shot!

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Maybe bravery should be releated to a number of things on a small scale. Like the soldier ranks, medals, number of missions, aliens killed and morale tests/psi. So soldier thar perform well and survives long, will naturally have a higher morale. Dont make sense that a soldier who goes crazy during combat is the one that actually improves...

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Yeah, I was surprised during my first alien base attack mission that pretty much every one of my troopers was at one point affected by a psi attack. Every single one of them was at full morale, and their morale ranged from about 52 to 81. The guy with 81 went berserk and killed 2 of his fellow Xenonauts at close range. This was one of my higher level leaders. And it was only a small alien base.

Making medals worth more would be an easy fix, I suppose, though I'd probably prefer a morale boost when in-combat similar to like what happens now if you kill an enemy. So, if you're attacked with psi-powers, and you resist, that soldier gets a morale boost. But it needs to be significant enough, because the door swings both ways (fail a psi-check and you get a morale de-buff).

I don't know, just thinking out loud. [i'm playing the current stable build, which I know is has psi-power imbalances that are being addressed.]

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  • 2 weeks later...

On a modding note, where are the values for the bonuses conferred by medals? The only part I could find and identify was a line under the strings file, but that seems like the text you get from mousing over rather than the actual stat change.

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I also think something should be changed about the bravery system. As it is, it just doesn't have much play-value.

Personally, I like dpelectrics suggestion best: beef up veterans' morale, but make the psi attacks of high-tier enemies more dangerous.

I think the medals are not only the easiest way to achieve that, but also the most consistent one, as they already reflect various aspects of battlefield experience.

(Be as it may, I already suspected the morale to be hard to increase - so it did the same as in X-Com: hire only soldiers with a starting morale >55, all other stats good to have but not as important.)

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Something neat about the psi mechanic would be if the initial Bravery stats for all soldiers are hidden up until you actually clash with Psi aliens. Is it possible to mod something like that?

I don't think so. You could probably remove bravery from all the places in the UI that it displays, but you wouldn't be able to set it up such that it became visible later.

EDIT:

Aw shucks. What about stat increases from leveling up a stat? Is it possible to increase bravery by 2 points instead of 1 per level up then?

Apparently not. Every time a soldier panics, they gain one 'bravery' experience point. The game is set so you only need one experience point to gain one bravery. However, soldiers are capped at +1 bravery per mission.

You could remove the cap, or set it higher, allowing panicking multiple times on the same mission to grant additional bravery. But you can't set it so that a single panic event grants multiple points of bravery.

(I tried changing the number of bravery experience points needed for a point of bravery to 0.5, but the game rewarded this idea with a CTD on mission end.)

Edited by kabill
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I really wish that bravery increased more than it does now. As it stands I've got a pair of colonels covered in medals whose bravery stat is actually lower than privates I just hired who are going into their first mission. In fact, on several occasions my Colonels panic before everyone else does. Not very inspiring leadership from someone who has completed 47 missions. All that experience and I'm sitting pretty on 55 Bravery total, compared to 100 TUs, 96 accuracy, and 89 strength it stands out a little. This woman has killed 74 aliens yet she panics if anything at all goes wrong.

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Personally, I like dpelectrics suggestion best: beef up veterans' morale, but make the psi attacks of high-tier enemies more dangerous.

I am not so keen on that myself and I agree with dpelectrics assessment of the change.

If you need to take a rookie along on a late game mission they will be next to useless as they will lack the morale to have a useful level of protection.

If you up veteran morale in line with the high rank alien psi powers then you also have no different game play to the current system.

All it does is reduce the effectiveness of rookies further and promote hiring for bravery as the most important stat, especially in the late game.

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Every time I play against ceaseans I manually deplete all of my soldiers of TUs if they have other soldiers who they can shoot at in the vicinity.. Works like a charm. Just hide your exposed soldiers so they are hard to shoot at/hit.

Rotating them on the ground is the fastest way I have found to do it. It can be a chore though.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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