User:Riw/SquadronUnleashed

Squadron Unleashed, or Squadron Unleashed 2 is a Long War mod by szmind which greatly enhances the air game. In short: multiple ships can engage UFO's, they have two weapons equipped, they can go short/long range at user's request or automatically as defined. Pilots are separated from ships, they gain experience, choose career paths, and gain unique traits. They also get experience outside combat, in the Training Center. Basically, it should have been part of Long War in the first place, and you are missing a lot by not installing it.

You can download and also read some basic documentation here: https://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/809.

New Aircraft Weapon

Vulcan Cannon - is available in unlimited quantity, has stats of Phoenix Cannon but with only 75% damage and no Armor Penetration. It is a short range weapon - it can't fire at long range by default. This weapon is Secondary slot only, it can't fit in the Primary slot.

Game Start

You start the game with 4 Interceptors, already equipped with Avalanche Missiles in the Primary slots and Vulcan Cannons in the Secondary slots, and 4 pilots already assigned to the Interceptors.

Hangar

After the Mod is properly installed, the Hangar menu appears with 4 items.

View Aircraft List

View and edit all fighter craft owned by XCOM.

This provides access to the management of XCOM air forces (ships). Possible operations:

Order new Interceptors Delivery time is 3 days, cost is 200 credits (150 with NA continent bonus).
Distribution of your ships by continent There are 5 continents, each of which can have up to 6 ships. You can also transfer ships under repair, but those on rearmament cannot be moved. Transferring a ship from one continent to another takes 2 days.
Selecting a specific ship opens its menu, in which you can:
- View performance characteristic of primary and secondary weapon, and the ship itself.
- Re-equip both primary and secondary weapon - note that you cannot remove a weapon - all ship are always equipped with two weapons. Equipping Avalanche/Stingray Missiles takes 12 hours, Vulcan Cannon 6 hours, other weapons take 7 days to equip.
- Dismiss Ship - beware that the installed weapons disappear, but the pilot will just become unassigned. You should probably never do that.
- Change Pilot - you assign another pilot from the Pilot Roster to the ship, or you can Remove the pilot from the ship. Note there is no rename option: ships have no names, only pilots do. All ships with no assigned pilot are just referred as --NO PILOT ASSIGNED--.

View Pilot Roster

Manage your pilots, assign career paths, transfer between continents.

This is a list of your pilots, independent of your ships. Note there is a monthly costs of your pilots displayed in the upper part (by default each pilot costs 1 credit per month) - this cost is NOT displayed in the View XCOM Finances menu. Possible operations:

Order new Pilot New Pilot appears immediately, but starts working after 24 hours. The cost is 10 credits (configurable). New pilot starts at level 0 (=F.O.) with zero experience and kills.
Distribution of your pilots by continent There are 5 continents, each of which can have up to 10 pilots. Transferring a pilot from one continent to another takes 24 hours. Note that if you transfer a pilot which is assigned to a ship, he is first unassigned and then transferred, leaving the ship without a pilot.
Selecting a specific pilot opens its menu, in which you can:
- View pilot's current stats, such as days of service, number of interceptions, total interception time, kills, experience, career (at the top), current bonuses to aim, defense, damage, squadron size (the number of ship he can command), squadron aim, squadron defense, and his Traits and their limitations if any.
- Rename the Pilot. The 4 initial pilots are named RAVEN-1 - RAVEN-4. After first rename, they gain real names such as "Serrano" Peppers. New Pilots gain real names automatically. So it is recommended to rename the 4 initial pilots immediately.
- Change Career. As pilots gain experience and UFO kills, they get levels (level 0=F.O., level 1=Lt, etc.). From Liutenant level, their air combat skills differ based on chosen career. Pilots can pursue three different careers: Ace, Gunner, or Leader. Ace is the default career. Each career focuses on different aspect of air combat: Ace focuses on aim and defense, Gunner on aim and damage, and Leader on aim and defense of the whole squadron. Changing a career at level 1 or later is possible, but it will mean the pilot will be unavailable for 7 days plus 7 days per level already obtained. More detail on careers later.
- Dismiss Pilot - Simply removes the pilot from the roster, saving 1 credit per month. You should probably never do that.

Air Force HQ - Combat Tactic

Adjust combat tactics.

Here you just define how the ships behave in air combat, based on selected tactic, or stance (Aggressive, Balanced, Defensive) as selected before each air engagement.

Auto-back off, Auto-abort. By default, ships will Auto-back off at 67/50/25 (AGG/BAL/DEF) percent of their HP. Backing-off means going long range if they were short range. See later short/long range discussion. Ships will Auto-abort (disengage from combat) at 33%/25%/10% of HP (AGG/BAL/DEF). You can define any values here, my recommendation is being a little more cautious - DEF: 80-40 BAL: 60-30 AGG: 40-20.

Start Combat Close. This means go short range immediately at the start. It is by default on for AGG and BAL tactics. Now this should definitely depend on equipped weapons, not stance. I recommend to turn this off for all stances, if you value your ships, as UFOs always prefer ships at short range as their targets and even have a big bonus to hitting your short range ships. Now if your both weapons are short range, the ship will go short anyway, fortunately.

Stance	Back-off		Abort		Start Close
Stance	Default	Recommended	Default	Recommended	Default	Recommended
DEF	67%	80%	33%	40%	off	off
BAL	50%	60%	25%	30%	on	off
AGG	25%	40%	10%	20%	on	off

Air Force HQ - Training Guidelines

Adjust training guidelines.

Here you define the Training Center parameters. It has 4 parameters:

Training Cycle XP Bonus defines how many XP does a pilot gain per training cycle spent in the Training Center.
Training Cycle Duration defines how long in days the training cycle lasts.
Training Center Capacity defines how many pilots can train simultaneously.
Upper Limit of XP defines the upper XP limit a pilot can be trained to. For example, if the limit is 200, bonus is 20 XP and the pilot already has 190 XP, he can train but will only gain 10 XP at the end (up to the limit) instead of 20 XP.

The first two parameters are defined by Training Programs, Training Facilities determine the Capacity, and finally Training Staff determines the XP Limit. Increasing Training Programs (level 0-4) cost Credits, increasing Training Facilities (level 0-5) costs both Credits and monthly Credits, increasing Training Staff (level 0-5) costs only monthly Credits. This can also be downgraded to save on monthly costs. Note that the total monthly Credit costs is displayed in the View XCOM Finances menu under Hangar (the first item in the list).

TRAINING CENTER	Level	Upgrade Cost	Monthly Cost	XP Bonus	Duration	Capacity	XP Limit
Training Programs	0	0	0	20	20	--	--
	1	50		25	18
	2	150		30	15
	3	300		35	13
	4	500		40	10
Training Facilities	0	0	0	--	--	3	--
	1	100	5			4
	2	300	15			6
	3	500	25			8
	4	700	35			10
	5	900	45			12
Training Staff	0	0	0	--	--	--	200
	1		20				400
	2		40				700
	3		60				1100
	4		80				1600
	5		100				2200

It is best to do any changes to the Training Center in the last day of a month, since all changes are applied only from the beginning of the next month. Also note that any ongoing training cycle uses old levels even in the new month. Only new training cycles in the new month use the new levels.

Training Center

Sign-up pilots for additional training when idle.

Here you finally sign-up pilots for training. Pilots on training can engage in air combat normally, their training will just be paused. Their training is also paused when they recover after combat (by default 1 hour only) or when they are injured. Pilots have a 50% chance to be injured for 14 days if their ship is shot down and they survive. They have a 50% chance + 5% per their level to survive, but 100% at Cmdr.

You can remove pilots from training, but no XP is then gained. Usually there is no reason to do so.

Before Air Combat

On UFO Contact Screen, you can choose which ships would engage the UFO. If the ship has no pilot assigned, you are given a choice to assign a pilot. The maximum number of ships is defined by the best Squadron Size parameter of a selected pilot.

There are 3 buttons on a ship card:

Stance: DEF, BAL, AGG. As in vanilla Long War, this defines whether the ship prioritizes UFO destruction (AGG) or safety (DEF). Basically, DEF means -15 Aim but +20% Dodge (20% chance to change hit into miss), AGG means +15 Aim but 25% chance to change miss into hit (I recommend to change to this to 20% in the configuration (AGG_JET_FORCE_HIT_CHANCE) to keep symmetry).
Weapons used. Use both, only primary, or only secondary. Well, the author says that disabling a weapon might lead to longer engagement leading to more XP, or that by disabling high damage weapon would increase the chance of UFO not being destroyed but shot down, or that by going EMP Cannon only means less artifacts will be destroyed. While all this is true, the main goal in every engagement is to outgun and destroy the UFO as fast as possible while suffering ideally no damage to your ships. So you should definitely always use both your weapons, no exceptions.
Pilot. This allows for last minute's change of the ship's pilot.

Aggro. Ship, Weapons, Stance, and Defense stat all contribute to the ship's Aggro stat, which is also displayed on the ship's card, next to DPS, Aim, and Defense. Aggro is well explained in the documentation and tutorials. The UFO will target ship that is close, then with highest Aggro.

After everything is set, press the Launch Fighter(s) button to start engagement.

During Air Combat

In vanilla Long War, the only thing you can do during Air Combat is to use Modules or Abort the engagement entirely.

In Squadron Unleashed, you can also manage the ship's distance. Select the ship by clicking it, then double click to change distance from Long to Short or vice versa. Or use Up/Down keys to select ship then Left/Right to change distance. Ships will also change distance automatically (basically just go long) based on the settings in Combat Tactic. Space or Enter keys abort. Aborting is valid for the active ship only; the engagement continues until either party is destroyed/shot down or all ships aborted. Modules are used by all ships.

Weapons Rebalance

In Squadron Unleashed, all air weapons are hugely rebalanced. They get somewhat random bonuses or penalties by going short or long distance, can fit to only primary or only secondary weapon slot, or have limited ammo.

Long vs Short Distance

In vanilla Long War, you have no control over the distance, and it plays almost no role there. It is selected automatically based on the equipped weapon.

Short Range Weapons are: Vulcan Cannon, Phoenix Cannon, Laser Cannon, EMP Cannon.
Long Range Weapons are: Avalanche Missiles, Stingray Missiles, Plasma Cannon, Fusion Lance.
UFO Weapons do equally well at both ranges.

Now distance is of critical importance in Squadron Unleashed. By default, UFO's get huge +20 aim bonus toward short range ships, making short range weapons severely disadvantaged. Not only that, but also the fact that short range weapons cannot shoot long range at all (hardcoded), while long range weapons can always shoot short, they either get a penalty to aim or sometimes even a bonus aim. With the default setup, you might quite often see your ships as sitting ducks not shooting at all, just taking damage. You don't want this to happen at all. I think the weapons are pretty well balanced in LW - no need for such drastic changes.

Thus I recommend to change the defaults, so that all weapons are defined as Long range, making sure they can fire. They will get -15 Aim penalty at Long range though - similarly Long range weapons get that penalty for going Short. Now you can manually go Short with Short range weapons, or even turn on the Start Close option for all stances.

Weapon	Distance		iAimMod		iAimModClose
Weapon	Default	Recommended	Default	Recommended	Default	Recommended
Vulcan	short	long	0	-15	0	15
Avalanche	long		0	0	-15	-15
Stingray	long		0	0	-15	-15
Phoenix	short		0	-15	0	15
Laser	short		0	-15	0	15
Plasma	long		-20	0	20	-15
EMP	short		0	-15	0	15
Fusion	long		0	0	20	0
UFO	long		0	0	20	5

iAimMod is an Aim modifier under all circumstances. iAimModClose is Aim modifier when the ship is Short range. So at Short range, these bonuses stack.

In the recommended settings, basically all weapons Aim remains vanilla LW, with -15 Aim penalty for going wrong distance. Thus all short range weapons get iAimMod=-15 and iAimModClose=15, meaning they get -15 Aim penalty at Long Range and no bonus at Short Range. Long Range weapons except Fusion Lance get iAimMod=0 and iAimModClose=-15, meaning they get no bonus at Long Range and -15 Aim penalty for Short Range. The exception is Fusion Lance, which gets no penalty for close range (but no +20 bonus!), which feels right. UFO's don't get +20 Aim bonus towards Short range ships, but just +5. It can surely even be 0, but since they always prefer Short range ships, so they deserve a small bonus there, but surely not +20.

Primary vs Secondary

In the default settings, some weapons fit only Primary slot, while others fit only Secondary slot, with the exception of Plasma Cannon, which fits both slots. There is no reason for such restrictions, with some exceptions:

The Vulcan Cannon is hard-coded for Secondary slot only.
The starting Avalanche and Stingray Missiles should go to Primary slot only, otherwise the Vulcan Cannon would serve no purpose - why not go double Avalanche then? The early game would then be unbalanced.
The Fusion Lance is Primary only; it's a very late game and also very rare weapon it would be a waste to fit into Secondary and also way too powerful to fit both. It is so large that a ship - Firestorm only - can only carry one such weapon, that makes sense.
All other weapons should fit both slots, as there is no reason for them not to.

Weapon	Weapon Slot
Weapon	Default	Recommended
Vulcan	Secondary	Secondary
Avalanche	Primary	Primary
Stingray	Primary	Primary
Phoenix	Secondary	Both
Laser	Secondary	Both
Plasma	Both	Both
EMP	Secondary	Both
Fusion	Primary	Primary

There are two configuration parameters worth mentioning here: XCOM_DMG_MODIFIER_GLOBAL and SECONDARY_WPN_DMG_MOD. As now all weapons can fit Primary slot (except the added Vulcan), the Secondary slot can be thought as really only unnecessary additional weapon, doing only half damage. You may as well leave the Vulcan Cannon there for the whole game for all ships and don't use the Secondary slot at all. Or use it only when you can afford it. The advantage is, you can then go Long/Short range depending solely on the Primary slot. After all, the weapons are quite expensive for all ships to have two. To balance this out, we leave the global modifier at 1, also making damage calculations much easier.

Parameter	Value
Parameter	Default	Recommended
XCOM_DMG_MODIFIER_GLOBAL	0.7	1.0
SECONDARY_WPN_DMG_MOD	1.0	0.5

Ammo

So, you can go out of ammo now. Then what? You would expect an automatic Abort, so the ship is not a sitting duck. We really don't want that. But no, we get a sitting duck. I think the concept of air weapons ammo is really an unnecessary addition. Now some weapons have limited ammo, some unlimited. The weapons were already well balanced, we don't want to unbalance them further with ammo. So all ammo to unlimited, right?

Recommended Config Settings

So here is the recommended weapons table. You can copy-paste it to your config file.

;Vulcan Cannon: short range - will NEVER fit primary slot (ignores bPrimary setting) - this is hardcoded to avoid CTDs and overall bugs with "none" primary weapon
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=0,  bPrimary=FALSE, bSecondary=TRUE,  bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=6,  iAimMod=-15, iAimModClose=15,  iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;Phoenix: short range
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=1,  bPrimary=TRUE,  bSecondary=TRUE,  bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=-15, iAimModClose=15,  iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;Stingray: long range
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=2,  bPrimary=TRUE,  bSecondary=FALSE, bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=12, iAimMod=0,   iAimModClose=-15, iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;Avalanche: long range - will ALWAYS fit primary slot (ignores bPrimary setting) - this is hardcoded cause new ships have this as starting weapon
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=3,  bPrimary=TRUE,  bSecondary=FALSE, bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=12, iAimMod=0,   iAimModClose=-15, iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;Laser: short range
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=4,  bPrimary=TRUE,  bSecondary=TRUE,  bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=-15, iAimModClose=15,  iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;Plasma: long range
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=5,  bPrimary=TRUE,  bSecondary=TRUE,  bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=0,   iAimModClose=-15, iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;EMP: short range
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=6,  bPrimary=TRUE,  bSecondary=TRUE,  bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=-15, iAimModClose=15,  iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;Fusion: both ranges
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=7,  bPrimary=TRUE,  bSecondary=FALSE, bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=0,   iAimModClose=0,   iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;UFO Plasma I
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=8,  bPrimary=FALSE, bSecondary=FALSE, bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=0,   iAimModClose=5,   iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;UFO Plasma II
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=9,  bPrimary=FALSE, bSecondary=FALSE, bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=0,   iAimModClose=5,   iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)
;UFO_Fusion
ShipWeapons=(iWeaponType=10, bPrimary=FALSE, bSecondary=FALSE, bClose=false, iAmmo=-1, RearmHours=0,  iAimMod=0,   iAimModClose=5,   iCritChanceMod=0, fDmgMod=0.0, iDmgMod=0, fCritDmgMod=0.0, iCritDmgMod=0)