The HVT chain

What it is

A garrison soldier killed by a player has a small chance of carrying a note. It names a quiet zone somewhere else on the map, where an officer of the same force is living among the civilians — out of uniform in every way but the uniform itself, unarmed, walking the streets and sleeping in a house like anybody else.

Go there, find him, and ask. He gives up his commander, and a Kill objective appears paying more than an ordinary one, because two trips and a conversation went into finding it.

The middle of the chain has no task and no marker. Between reading the note and having the conversation, the only record of the lead is the note and whoever read it. Following it up is navigation and memory. The objective machinery comes back in at the end, where an objective actually exists.

The note

The drop is rolled per garrison soldier a player kills, at 5%. A typical garrison of eight yields a note about a third of the time, and a drawn-out fight about half — a long fight is likelier to turn up a lead than a short one, because reinforcements absorbed into the garrison are eligible like anybody else in it.

The note names its zone on inspection, and any player can read it.

An ignored note does not hold the map hostage. It lies parented to the objective it dropped at, so the site’s own cleanup takes it away with the wreck and the bodies, and the chain cancels with it. The window for picking a lead up is the window for searching the site.

Engaging with it is what saves it. Picking it up moves it into an inventory; reading it detaches it where it lies. Either way a lead somebody has touched outlives the site it came from.

The contact

He is a real resident, placed through the same machinery as every other civilian in the zone — a house of his own, a wander circuit, indoors at night. He exists only while somebody is near enough for the town to be simulated, and he reads as a civilian to every system that asks, name tags and casualty billing included.

Killing him is billed like killing any other civilian, and it ends the chain. The faction is told the trail has gone cold. See Base protection for what a civilian death costs.

You do not have to find him unaided. Ask the residents — most will point him out. Roughly one in ten informs on the asker instead, which is deliberately low: at odds where asking usually goes badly, nobody asks twice and the feature costs more than it gives.

While a chain is running

Only one chain runs at a time.

The chain holds one of the director’s concurrent-objective slots and keeps its zone clear of new objectives, even though nothing appears in the task list. The lead is work in progress, and dropping an unrelated firefight on top of the town you are quietly walking into would undo the point of it.

Across a restart

State is kept in <profile>/ATG/atg-scenario-hvtchain.json.

• A note nobody had read when the server went down is gone from the world with no way back to it, so that chain is cancelled rather than restored.
• A read note restores the waiting contact.
• A chain that had already reached its objective owes it again on the next start.

Configuring it

Chains are entries in the objective template list, alongside the ordinary objective types — see Configuration.

Configure one entry per force you want a chain for, tiered so the contact and the commander match whoever is garrisoning the map at the time. An entry is drawn when a chain starts and then pinned for that chain’s whole life — the contact is re-placed each time his zone fills, and a template that moved with the tier would change the clothes he is standing in while somebody is walking to meet him.

The contact prefab needs the informant component on it, along with its request action. Without them nobody can ask him anything, and the server says so in a warning naming the prefab.

The mod ships one chain configured, so a server running the stock garrisons has the feature without setting anything up. Add your own entries for other forces.