Terrorist Escort missions Items, Dialog default to SEPARATIST (Vanilla+Modded)

[Regalis11]

Discussed in #16019

^{Originally posted by ubertpendragon May 3, 2025}

Disclaimers

• I have searched the issue tracker to check if the issue has already been reported.
• My issue happened while using mods.

What happened?

Terrorist Escort missions Items and Dialog do not respect the parameters defined in the mission and use separatist ones by default.
This is both true in vanilla and modded.

Items will mix items defined across all terrorist missions for some reason, reloading the mission leads to different loadouts
(example below has husked robe equipped)

Vanilla

Modded
Example: Husk Terrorist saying "death to the coalition", despite being set to use custom dialog lines

  <huskterroristannounce>The depths will take the unbelievers!</huskterroristannounce>
  <huskterroristannounce>Those who reject the gift must drown!</huskterroristannounce>
  <huskterroristannounce>Perish and be reborn as Husk!</huskterroristannounce>

The terrorist is supposed to use custom lines and items

    <EscortMission
      identifier="escorthuskterrorist"
      tags="escortterrorists,escortterroristshusk,escort"
      type="Escort"
      difficulty="2"
      commonness="100"
      reward="2000"
      achievementidentifier="escortmission"
      baseescortedcharacters="1"
      scalingescortedcharacters="0.35"
      terroristchance="0.01"
      terroristannouncedialogtag="huskterroristannounce">
      <Characters>
        <Character from="escortnpcs1" identifier="commoner" />
      </Characters>
      <TerroristItems>
        <Item identifier="cultistrobes" equip="true" />    
        <Item identifier="divingknife" mindifficulty="0"/>      
        <Item identifier="syringegun" equip="true" mindifficulty="20">
          <Item identifier="sulphuricacidsyringe" />
          <Item identifier="sulphuricacidsyringe" />
          <Item identifier="sulphuricacidsyringe" />
          <Item identifier="sulphuricacidsyringe" />
        </Item>
        <Item identifier="volatilecompoundn" mindifficulty="30"/>
        <Item identifier="divingknifeunique" mindifficulty="50"/>
      </TerroristItems>
      <Reputation identifier="location" amount="3" />
      <Icon texture="Content/UI/MissionIcons.png" sourcerect="768,512,256,256" color="243,146,755" />
      <LocationType from="AnyOutpost" to="AnyOutpost" />
      <message header="missionheader0.escorthuskterrorist" text="missionmessage0.escorthuskterrorist"/>
      <message header="missionheader1.escorthuskterrorist" text="missionmessage1.escorthuskterrorist"/>
    </EscortMission>  

Missing a knife

Missing robes (same mission, just reloaded)

Reproduction steps

Load campaign
Go to Separatist station
unlockmission escort4separatists (unlocks counter-stakeout)
Pick mission
teleportsub end to trigger terrorists
Terrorists (coalition operatives) use separatist lines and equipment

Version

v1.8.8.1 (Calm Before the Storm Hotfix 2)

[Regalis11]

Addressed in our private repo (coming up in a future build):

• Fixed terroristAnnounceDialogTag being completely ignored, making the terrorists always say the default separatist lines regardless of what's configured in XML.
• Added support for spawning multiple items for the terrorist, or optionally choosing random ones using a "ChooseRandom" element. Previously we always only chose one random item.
• Added some comments to clarify some of the settings to modders.

To me it seemed like there weren't any bugs with the spawning, although unintuitively it only chose one random item to spawn from the configured TerroristItems. Now it's possible to either choose random ones or spawn multiple ones.

[ubertpendragon]

To me it seemed like there weren't any bugs with the spawning, although unintuitively it only chose one random item to spawn from the configured TerroristItems. Now it's possible to either choose random ones or spawn multiple ones.

I thought it would spawn all the items listed, that makes sense

Thank you mr regalis