Changing out Enemy weapons through research?

This probably cannot been done, however I thought I ask as sometimes modders have managed certain feats by thinking outside the box.

Basically I want to change the weapons equipped to aliens in aiprops.xml based on a research project.

I foolishly tried replacing an item, however this only really works for weapons in the soldiers view and not aliens themselves.

If I cant swap out the weapon, I would be happy to swap out the alien, however don't think you can do that either.

No, can't be done (outside of the game code, anyway). Alien inventories are static.

The closest you will be able to get to doing this is creating duplicates of some alien types and using those duplicates in later UFOs rather than the original. The duplicates can be armed with different weapons. E.g. if you wanted to upgrade the weapon carried by Caesan Guard aliens you could creates a new Caesan Guard_Advanced alien with a better weapon for inclusion on Landing Ship and larger UFOs.

However, this wouldn't allow you to apply those upgrades to smaller UFOs' crew as crew lists are also static. I'm also aware that this doesn't tie the upgrade to a particular tech (there's utterly no way of doing that) but if you're just looking for a mid-game upgrade this might be sufficient?

No, can't be done (outside of the game code, anyway). Alien inventories are static.

The closest you will be able to get to doing this is creating duplicates of some alien types and using those duplicates in later UFOs rather than the original. The duplicates can be armed with different weapons. E.g. if you wanted to upgrade the weapon carried by Caesan Guard aliens you could creates a new Caesan Guard_Advanced alien with a better weapon for inclusion on Landing Ship and larger UFOs.

However, this wouldn't allow you to apply those upgrades to smaller UFOs' crew as crew lists are also static. I'm also aware that this doesn't tie the upgrade to a particular tech (there's utterly no way of doing that) but if you're just looking for a mid-game upgrade this might be sufficient?

Thanks.....

I was actually looking to do a downgrade.. but looks like it cant be done.

I wanted to have a genetic research project that would give partial immunity to reaper attacks... I then wanted to swap the reaper weapon out with one that just did damage and not change you to a zombie etc...

Oh well back to the drawing board.