[BFME] Inconsistent behavior in ModifierLists with Category LEADERSHIP

[ClementJ18]

This is something that was discovered recently during a discussion I had with some other people on how leaderships behave in the game, what we found is that certain leaderships conflict with one another. When a unit is under the influence of two leaderships that have ModifierLists that affect different stats, instead of combining the two, the game instead switches between the two leaderships every few seconds.

We ran a few tests in Rise of the Witch King and here were the results. A = a Hero with a ModifierList of category leadership that provides ARMOR 200% B = a Hero with a ModifierList of category leadership that provides DAMAGE_MULT 200% C = a Hero with a ModifierList of category leadership that provides ARMOR 200% and DAMAGE_MULT 200% D = a Hero with a ModifierList of category leadership that provides DAMAGE _MULT 150%

We tested this by pitting different battalions of units against each other, a battalion would either be under the leadership effect of C or under the leadership effect of both A and B. The logical conclusion would be that they should be evenly matched, however, we found that the units under C's leadership would always win by a big lead. This leads us to the hypothesis that something was wrong with how the game applied multiple leaderships. So we tested again by adding DisplayMeleeDamage to a unit to see how its stats were affected and putting it under the leadership of A and B, what happened is that the number would keep changing between the base value and the value affected by B's leadership which seems to reinforce the idea that the units are sometimes affected by A's and sometimes by B's leadership.

We also did some tests by giving heroes leaderships that buffed the damage by different amount but we found, in that case, the damage seemed to stack and the units under the influence of both B and C would kill their target faster than units under the influence of either B or C. This seems to indicate that different leaderships that buff the same stats stack but leaderships that buff different stats conflict, cycling between the two.

I don't know what the expected behaviour was that EA intended in terms of stacking leadership but at least to me, it would make sense that leaderships that affect different stats should both be applied. Although this does leave the question of what about leaderships that have overlaps in what they buff or that buff the exact same stats. Should they stack? Should only the greater modifier stack? I'm not sure if you were aware of this quirk so I wanted to bring it to your attention in case it turns out you want to fix these kinds of issues in OpenSage.

Finally, a small warning, I believe all the data above to be accurate but we did struggle to test this fully since stats, in general, are completely hidden while in the game and we don't know if DisplayMeleeDamage even works properly. I hope I didn't make any obvious mistakes, we had to test a couple of times as we also discovered that ModifierLists defined in the map.ini

[MiraakThuri]

Pretty old but actually it's perfectly normal:

in rotwk (unlike in bfme1), multiple "LEADERSHIP" category modifiers won't stack by default, unless you enable it (by removing the line "ReplaceInCategoryIfLongest" or set it to No instead of Yes) When stacking is not allowed, the game will pick the one with the longest duration (so if you use passive modifiers it will be pretty random) you are supposed to use diffrent category (or disable stacking)

this is more a bfme modding question rather than an OpenSage issue