I guess I should start by saying that I'm brand new to modding. After trying a bunch of different mods I decided that FoK was the closest to what I was looking for in terms of gameplay and general style, but I wanted to make a few tweaks. I've spent the past few days poking around in Corsix and learnt a lot, but I'm starting to run into problems that I'm not sure I can solve on my own.
What I'm trying to do is add heavy weapons to squads as leaders rather than upgrades to the base trooper, while leaving special weapons as normal upgrades. I figured that by doing heavy weapons this way it would be possible to replicate the TT rules where you can have one heavy weapon and one special weapon, but not two of each (which seemed like a good idea in a "closer to codex" mod ). FoK already has leaders with four or more ranged upgrades and the mod manages to fit them all on its updated UI, so I figured it should be possible.
I managed to remove heavy weapons from a space marine tac squad without any issues. Then I created a marine EBP with all the heavy weapons and no special weapons, and complex_upgrades turned on. I added him as a leader to the tac squad expecting to see all his heavy weapons available, but no luck. After some more poking around I figured out that the leader weapon upgrades are some sort of ability. By copying one of the abilities from the SM tac squad sergeant (the plasma combi bolter upgrade ability), giving it to my heavy weapons "leader" and changing the ui_index_hint I was able to give my heavy weapons marine the ability to upgrade his base bolter to a heavy bolter.
The problem is... I've looked over the ability several times in Corsix and for the life of me I can't figure out how it actually works! The mod includes a whole heap of these upgrade abilities and I've tried comparing them to see what changes in different ones, and I've also looked for the part where it (presumably) specifies the weapon to upgrade to, but I can't find anything. Does anybody know how these things work? I might be able to get a bit further (i.e. adding more weapons) by copying some of the other upgrades and adjusting accordingly, but I'd rather try and actually understand what I'm changing if possible.
If I can get all this working there's also another problem that I think I'm going to run into later on: unlike the marines, the guard heavy weapons teams are split across 3 .whm files. Unless there's a way for my guard heavy weapons leader EPB to use more than one .whm file (I think not?) I'm going to have to figure out a way of somehow combining all the different files into a single .whm. Any ideas for how to go about this? I've done a bit of playing and figured out how to use the FFE tool to import chunks, but I'm assuming it's more complicated than just mashing everything together in a single file and calling it quits? What would be the easiest way of getting everything to work in the one file?
Thanks for reading Any help or advice at all would be greatly appreciated!