Jorgen_CAB

Great information! The damage formula was pretty much what I presumed but I did not know that armour was degraded after being used so this was very helpful. Many thanks!

Ah... ok... that about suppression I didn't know. Although it does make sense in a way that soldiers using heavier armour is harder to suppress, they simply is more confident. It does seem that aliens hardly have any armour at all though in the vanilla game, to the point where armour mitigation on weapons are not that useful for X-Com agents. If it works like I suspect that it does, which is simply ignoring that much armour on whatever you shoot at. Well, not a thing a mod can't change... thanks for your input. Anyway, I'm toying with the idea to reduce the hit point overall on enemies and increase their armour value. Of course that also means that suppression on more advanced weapons will have to be increased little as well. It will also mean that some weapons will be very useless against certain enemies, although the mod I'm looking to create will lower the snowball effect and equalize weapons (and soldier stats) more and make each category more specialized rather than just a better choice. Certain aliens will also be better protected against certain types of damage than others and so forth. So you should probably bring different types of weapons to most missions to be safe.

Could someone with knowledge point me in the direction where the information about alien armour is. I only find a value in the aiprops.xml file which seem to be that alien natural armour value, not what actual armour they have. Or is this value suppose to reflect their actual armour and resistance against weapons.

Ok, so the weapons.xml is suppose to hold none combat stats while weapons_gc.xml is suppose to contain actual combat stats. Weapons_pc.xml do for example contain the weight stat but it will not do anything, not even in combat or in the screen where you equip your soldiers. The clip stat do seem to work so some extent but it becomes a bit wonky if you don't change it in both places.

Why is it that the values of clip size and the weight of a weapon can not be changed in the weapons_gc.xml file but has to instead be changed in the weapons.xml to really work? Just seems a little strange to me?!? That also begs the question what other values don't work when you change them in weapons_gc.xml? Someone with some insight?

Well, giving more OPTIONS might not be the right word. It will instead give you more operational CHOICES to make. Do you use your elite team on this mission and risk having to bench them on the terror mission you know is coming, perhaps that happens just as the chopper leave the base? Now... will you return and change the squad and keep your best soldiers for what is obviously a more dangerous mission or do you force them to participate on both missions and knowingly have them exhausted for a long time after this? These will become operational or strategical CHOICES between keeping a larger soldier base with slightly lower average experience level or using a more elite force. Perhaps even drug them to cope with the exhaustion... If you had played the Long War mod to X-Com you would know what I mean, that is just the type of choices you need to make. I'm not sure if the class system does make that much of a difference, at least in that mod. There you have eight different classes plus the psionic class and the SHIV and you can have up to eight soldiers on every mission and start with six. Most classes are not as important as in the original game either, except for maybe a medic perhaps. Soldiers typically need to rest for about 4-6 days and can be wounded up to a month or even more. When they rest you can take them out on missions but will automatically become exhausted for about two weeks, which is like being wounded. Another similar mechanic in another game that I play is Aurora which is a spaceship tactical game, here ships require maintenance and spend time in dock to do maintenance for quite some time. So, there is always a trade off on how long maintenance will last and how often you send them to do overhauls and how many of your ships you send there at the same time. If an attack happens while a ship is in overhaul they will not be able to join the fight, it takes to long to get them out of overhaul status. It is basically the same type of operational management that I'm talking of even if this is ships and not people. Just think of the ship as a soldier and the task-groups as squads...

Doesn't the medical bay just give you a number of beds to treat your soldiers in? So building two just give you the ability to treat more soldiers at the same time. At least that is what I think anyway, I have never built more than one medical bay so far and it is also one of the first things that I build in my base. Anyway, I'm hoping we can mod this in the future to get more reasonable healing time of our wounded soldiers. That would probably satisfy my need in a mod for balancing the game differently.

From a game perspective then I can understand that un-equipping the shield, go over the obstacle and then re-equipping it is a redundant mechanic. This could just be done automatically and expose the soldier for a brief moment. On the other hand from a realism standpoint using shields to the extent they can be used in the game are pretty unrealistic to begin with. Using available cover and a better weapon is far superior in almost all scenarios in real life anyway.

The one I can suggest is X-COM:Enemy Unknown from Firaxis using the Long War mod... this mechanic introduced a greater strategic importance on your elite soldiers. Now instead of playing the game with about ten soldiers you needed more like fifty to rotate them and cope with them being wounded or tired for much longer. And it does increase your strategical choices. Now you must manage the threat level of each mission since you can't just send your veteran soldiers out willy nilly. You need to manage and save them for the most dangerous operations while you send the less experienced ones on easier missions. Sure, you can always role-play it as an additional difficulty level, I still think it would force you to make a few more hard choices on an operational level.

I think that could be a point to start for a mod at least...

It would increase your choices. Do you take out your veteran for a simple mission only to have them exhausted when a terror site occur the day after. Perhaps you must use a tired soldier in a harder mission but they will now just need even more rest and be unavailable for even longer after it. This type of mechanic worked great in a mod to the new X-Com from Firaxis. It would not be tedious, just give you some more tactical choices to make in the strategic game. Do you focus on a smaller number of elite soldiers or train up a larger base to cover those times when you get many hard missions in a tight time window. As I said, it has worked in other similar squad management based games.

I will certainly look into the morale penalty side of the game files, thanks for pointing that out...

One of the few things that sort bother me about finishing a mission is that soldiers should need to rest before going to the next mission. If you send the same operative on missions too frequently they should eventually get exhausted. A system where they get penalties to strength, accuracy, reflexes and TU if they don't get some rest between missions (say 5-7 days) could be interesting since you would need more soldiers and you would put more importance on those that really make it to higher levels. Anyway... just wanted to throw the idea out there...