Little mod I whipped up.

[Ol' Stinky]

Yeah, I tried that. The aggressive pose only seems to work with guard-class and higher. They're the ones who are likely to move around the map.

EDIT: Hoo boy, you need to do a couple of things with flashbangs. I tried them out when they were first introduced, and they haven't changed whatsoever. Here's my findings from version 13(!)

Bummer, I guess it was my imagination then. Ah well. That AI update can't come quick enough!

Your findings with flashbangs seem on the nose, even now. Honestly, you'd probably be better off modding the pistol (or similarly currently unused weapon) into a short range suppression tool. Maybe even the assault rifle. Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of "real world" sense, but you can mimic the same effect by mucking around.

[Max_Caine]

Flashbangs can be useful, but three key stats need uprating - accuracy, range and radius. My preference is for Sathra's range uprating, a radius of 4 tiles and an accuracy of 80. 80 suppression isn't bad, tbh, it just needs certain things to make it work.

EDIT: Oh, and I already made a weapn like that - a shotgun that fires beanbags. I have a huge exotic armory - everything from scare gas to laser flashguns. It's all good fun.

[Ol' Stinky]

With the flashbang-to-gun conversion you also get the aim-guide, though, which I really like. Since lobbing is dodgy right now, the whole "can go over props" thing isn't too much of a deal, and since you've done it for the shotty already maybe Sathra can beg you for the code. ;P

Do you know if there's any way to affect the suppression rules? I was wondering whether it's possible to alter the way that a unit can only be suppressed to 50% of his APs on his next turn. I've been playing with altering aliens' APs for firing/reducing humans' armour/reducing aliens' damage to get around reaction fire murder, instead of straight up altering the reaction/accuracy scores. (I don't like random one-shots, even if they are rarer.) My thinking was to make reaction fire less lethal without actually nerfing the aliens, and so far it works for me, although I'm only at the jackel armour stage of the game. The trouble is that it kinda nerfs suppression a bit, although it's not too bad.

[Max_Caine]

Hefty donations to the "Get Chris and Aaron their own tropical islands" fund would be the only way - it's hardcoded in. It's easy to code in a beanbag shotty. All you have to do is jack up the suppression score, crank down the amount of damage, put it into items.xml and strings.xml and if you have to research it it has to go into researches and don't forget manufactures... ah.. yeah, maybe there's a little amount of work. But nothing too hard, and really, you only need like, three key files. Maybe four.

[Ol' Stinky]

Honestly, I'm just going to quickly edit the pistol's properties in weapons_gc to turn it into a suppressor machine, but I don't have a problem with using a magic flashbang firing pistol. I know the aesthetics of these things can really bug some people.

I was afraid it'd be hardcoded in! Ah well. It's not a big deal, and I'm glad that Xenonauts is as moddable as it seems, frankly. Having to use a hex editor to mod some stuff of XCom '12 was one of the things that killed that game for me.

[Sathra]

This isn't quite the place to discuss this. I increased the suppression damage to 200, so they still suppress less than a machinegun (machineguns are still the best) but at shotgun range or so they are damn effective. Also because of the increased range they have which means they drop off less.

Downloading the new build so new mod should be soon.