Elite Bazookas

Perhaps this is common knowledge among the gurus, but when I looked into the implementation of US elite bazookas I found a couple of surprising things, including one which I consider a bug.

So far as I can see the elite bazookas ability doesn't actually do anything except provide the ability icon. The difference is actually managed by providing two types of bazookas, which I will call "vanilla" and "buffed", with the latter having the improved range and penetration described when you hover your mouse over the ability icon. When a squad grabs a bazooka at the weapon rack, the weapon rack itself decides which type of bazooka to issue, depending on who is grabbing it.

If you replace the weapon racks with field upgrades it's easy enough to provide different upgrades depending on the squad, so that everyone gets the right bazooka type.

What I found even more surprising is that elite squads do not get any benefit when they pick up a bazooka off the ground. Whenever a squad drops a bazooka the game puts the "vanilla" prop on the ground, regardless of what the squad was actually carrying, and whenever anyone picks that up they get the "vanilla" slot item, regardless of what kind of squad they are. So the elite squads' ability icon misleading says that they are getting the elite benefits, when they actually are not.

You can fix that by modifying the prop's slotitem_ext->on_pickup_actions : replace the slot_item_add with two requirement_actions, one that detects aef+elite and adds the buffed slot item, and another that detects not(aef+elite) and thus adds the vanilla slot item.

When I first tried that nobody was able to pick up a bazooka. Perhaps it would work if you got all the requirement_action parameters right, but the solution I found was to wrap them both in a single non_blocking_list_action.

I have tested this by creating a different weapon icon for squads carrying the elite bazooka, and it all works: if an elite squad gets a bazooka via an upgrade or by picking one up, it gets the slot item with the new elite bazooka weapon icon; otherwise it gets the slot item with the default bazooka weapon icon.

The pick up bug is actually fixed, however this is not visible in the modding tools due to missing updates. This extraction tool can be used to view the live files in .json format: https://www.coh2.org/topic/110106/is-vickers-k-moving-accuracy-is-really-60/page/2#post_id885014

The pick up bug is actually fixed, however this is not visible in the modding tools due to missing updates. This extraction tool can be used to view the live files in .json format: https://www.coh2.org/topic/110106/is-vickers-k-moving-accuracy-is-really-60/page/2#post_id885014

Wait it is? Does that apply to the bren when commandos pick up a dropped tommy bren too?

Wait it is? Does that apply to the bren when commandos pick up a dropped tommy bren too?

Yes, that also provides the special commando variant when picked up by commandos.