Question. Why does Orbital Bombardment get interrupted if the Force Commander is killed after he finished casting? As in, he completes the animation, finishes standing still, starts responding to my orders, then gets killed... and the bombardment instantly stops, playing some of the remaining beam animations but without blasts. He already completed the casting, so what's going on? I literally lost count of how many times I've seen this happen. Hell, I've even seen it being canceled when another member of the squad he's attached to got hit with a knockdown weapon!
Granted, it's vanilla instead of DC or SS and was likely patched in those, but still.
On an unrelated note... by the Emperor's gold-plated underpants, vanilla's Unholy Ceremony mission on Insanity with Dawn of Skirmish is brutal. I thought Sacrifice was bad with the full-cap army spawned behind my base when I crossed the bridge in addition to the other side of the bridge literally being packed wall-to-wall with so many Eldar it took me four hours to finish and must've lost an entire company right there. But Unholy Ceremony definitely takes the cake with the AI's love of missiles and Obliterators rendering any attack not backed by massed artillery pointless, to say nothing of the infinitely respawning half-a-dozen Defilers, all of whom individually out-DPS an unupgraded Predator. I'm watching an unmodded Hard LP and the difference is huge. It's like Hyperion Peaks all over again. Hats off to the DoS team.
On the other hand, the AI is much less aggressive with vehicles. Unmodded, I remember a huge full-cap blob of Looted Tanks on mission 3 and a constant stream of Vypers and Fire Prisms on mission 6 but with DoS, the AI is still making them but no longer massing them. Granted, this is only version 1.4, but still.
Anyway. I discovered that back-porting Dark Crusade stats into vanilla is made significantly easier by dumping both versions of each unit into a file and using Notepad++ with the Compare plugin to diff them. But considering how many units, structures, weapons, abilities, upgrades, etc. there are in the game, it's going to take quite a while. As a matter of fact, I'm a mite conflicted whether I should use Dark Crusade or Soulstorm as a source for updating vanilla & WA stats, seeing as I never played Soulstorm. Which one is more balanced (or at least having less stuff like the BS-tier Defilers of vanilla)?
I already figured out that if I want to do everything I intend to put into the mod, I have no choice but to edit the mission scripts (tech tree unlocks and scripted dialogue) as well, since Gabriel talking about Missile Launchers in mission 2 is kinda silly if the tech tree won't allow it for at least four more missions (since I split Marines into Tacticals and Devastators, I'm not letting the player have Devastator Marines until mission 3 and they need a Fortress Monastery to equip missiles, which in turn isn't available until mission 6, which in turn also requires me to restrict the AI from building Killa Kans in mission 2 to actually make it doable on higher difficulties). Which reminds me... is the "squad can choose between multiple leaders" functionality (IG Command Squad, Fire Warrior Squad and O'Kais have that, off the top of my head) exclusive to WA and later, or does the vanilla build already support it? And if it does, can the squad's default entity type be one of the leaders in such a way that the game lumps them together rather than treating the starter as a regular, reinforcable squad member? I know the IG Command Squad doesn't consider the General as a regular member, but I'm still asking. To elaborate, I was originally thinking of combining Terminators and Assault Terminators into a single unit of three Terminators plus a single Assault Terminator leader (who not only does his thing in melee but also reduces incoming ranged damage for the squad, in order to make his presence worthwhile even in a shooty squad), but now I'm considering using the multiple-leaders option to let the player pick squad composition.