In Armor Clad

I really like this concept. I know the reasons WHY developers choose to do the "wave" format (Enemy Unknown, Terror from the Deep, XCOM 2012) and keep alien / player technology parallel -- because it could create some nasty balance issues, but personally? I want the alien invasion to feel like an invasion. I want the aliens to bring the pain. Will it suck to find a carrier as your first contact? Absolutely. But it would be awesome, amazing, terrifying, and possibly impossible -- exactly as it SHOULD be ( in my opinion ).

Dark colors (black, dark gray, dark blue) tend to be more "tactically oriented" -- especially for night ops and the like. Maybe black with gray shading of some kind, so that it's not just SOLID BLACK? Black and [any color] looks really good, actually. Black and gold trim/outline? Black and blue? I think it depends on the "look" of the armor, too. If it's got more cloth/padding, like the Jackal, then darker "faded" colors could work well -- like blue with some faded parts on it. If it's more metal/exoskeleton suit, then more metal-like colors. A darker steel blue, for example.

Ah! That fixed it! Thank you very much for that. I must have missed it on the main page. Thanks, a lot, for your awesome work on this mod -- as well as everyone's contributing mods ( Lore+ and all the others ).

Worked like a charm. Thanks for that. There's only one weird issue that didn't start showing up until AFTER I had put Jsleezy's mods in -- not sure how it would effect it, or why, but I got this little issue:

Out of curiosity, is this mod pack compatible with Jsleezy's Real Fighter Portrait Pack? I think Jsleezy's Real Armors works, even if only because it's just image files and no .xml edits, but both the Real Fighter Portrait Pack and XNT modify the gameconfig.xml.

I definitely don't want to see the game get too easy -- and in my opinion, this would make it just so. You could almost casually toss out planes and suffer in the short term, but never in the long term - as you would constantly always be able to 'come back' from plane losses. Currently, there is TOO much reliance on air combat, however. You lose two or three early, you're hard pressed to get back to any fighting position what-so-ever. By contrast, making the planes cheaper does exactly the same thing as well - it makes planes expendable, and they should not be. They are meant to be very expensive pieces of machinery and not fielded casually. My idea would be something in the middle -- why not make a mission out of it? Scenario: A condor gets shot down by a Scout and two heavy fighter escorts. The condor is NOT destroyed instantly, but crashes into the ground. Similar to downing a UFO ship, there is now a "Downed Fighter" mission. You can choose to send in help or not. If you DO choose to send in help, you'll be pitted against the enemies from the craft that shot down that UFO to begin with. Sort of like a UFO clean-up crew, to ensure there aren't any survivors. Objective? Like any other mission: secure the crash sight or eliminate all enemies. Here's the benefit of rescuing the downed aircraft: you tow it back to base and it's torn up. Less cost than completely making a new one, but still a repair cost and repair time. It tackles a few big points: adds another mission type ( which is nice ), makes planes ABLE to be salvaged without out-right making them indestructible, adds another layer of tactics and importance to decision making in the geoscape, makes it so that the air combat isn't a make-or-break it scenario, and doesn't alleviate the difficulty of losing planes substantially, but makes the game more forgiving in the short term.

What would make the battle rifle stand out against one extreme or the other, though? Example: Sniper Rifle soldiers are supreme at long range, while other weapons ( namely shotguns ) would be supreme at close range? Also: Is suppression determined by distance and the weapon itself, or is it some other mechanic?

I make this post with some slight hesitation due to balancing issues that may arise -- Realistically, Sniper Rifles are second only to full-automatic heavy weaponry as far as suppression goes - especially in terms of military combat. The average untrained person might get scared stiff from the roar of a shotgun, but trained personnel seem to handle it better. On the other than hand, when it comes to getting shot at by a sniper, it's full-on panic mode and everyone scrambles ( or maybe that's just too many war movies ). Their damage is incredibly high ( obviously ), their accuracy is outstanding, and they come in an extremely wide variety. For example, some of them are meant to be mobile (in terms of sniper rifle weight, at least) and fire smaller caliber rounds, while other sniper rifles are heavy, hulking behemoths that are meant to be set up at extreme ranges and not move very often. As it stands, Realism vs Balance is precarious when it comes to Sniper Rifles in particular. Even now, in the vanilla version of the game ( both on the normal and Experimental ) I run with 3 Snipers. With mods ( namely: Little Mod ) I use 4 and they absolutely destroy everything that they have line of sight to - up until we get to the tougher enemies. It's hard to balance them - too much damage, armor penetration, range, accuracy, and suppression makes them good for everything -except- going into the downed UFO itself. By the same token, later enemies mitigate a lot of their usefulness ( aka; the androids ), who shouldn't be suppressed -ever-, and whose armor makes them even take 4ish rounds from a standard ballistic Sniper Rifle and even more for any other kind of ballistic weaponry. Even more so, larger UFO's mean more of the combat takes place inside the UFO itself, which yet again severely limits them.