Mods I've made for pacing, balance, and fun.

[EvilEngineer]

Hi all, first post here. I'm a big fan of the old X-com series, and have been following this for some time. I saw this pop up on steam early access the other day so I knew I had to buy and play it. I love that the game right now is in a flat-file system. Nothing is more of a pain in the butt than dealing with proprietary archives to mod games.

I know that pacing is still being worked on at this moment. So its a big part of some of the modding I've done so far to increase my enjoyment of the game. I'll basically list below the changes I've made below.

(aiprops.xml)

1. Lowered "SightRange" parameter on all ranged aliens to 15. With the exception of Harridans who I changed to 16.

2. Changed above mentioned aliens from "PreferredRange" of long to medium or short depending on weapons. Pistol class will goto short now instead of Long, and dropped their accuracy 20 points across all ranks.

3. Lowered Reapers and zombie "SightRange" to 10.

4. Changed accuracy of melee on reapers and zombies from 100% to 75% (you can dodge melee now).

5. Significantly lowered the stats on all zombies. These are now very slow moving and bumbling creatures.

(aircrafts.xml)

1. Raised HP of 1st and 2nd tier crafts.

2. Attempted to add weapon slots... but it kept causing bomb outs. Anyone know exactly how to edit "Weapon Positons", "Loadout", and "SlotPositions" fields?

3. Significantly lowered HP of corvette and landing ships so that at least 2 corsairs working together can take them out. Previously I was losing full deployments of aircraft to these alone.

(aircraftweapons.xml)

1. Quadrupled ammo capacity of all autocannon class weapons. Also upped rate of fire by double, while lowering damage to 75%.

(armours_gc.xml)

1. Increased all "VisualParams" range to to at least match aliens. Also modified coneAngle to "120", instead of 90... which is more inline with reality.

2. Also raised energy resistances on all armors.

3. The Hunter now has a much further visual range than all units, making it an ideal scout.

4. All vehicles have much higher resistance values, making them a very viable mobile shield for infantry. Though they do have a very weak back armor.

*side note... there is a massive performance problem with increasing the site range too much. Especially on night levels.

(buildings.xml)

1. Lowered construction times of the garage, hanger, living quarters. These are in reality pretty basic structures... a floor, walls, ceiling and a bit of basic equipment.

2. Increased damage output of all turrets. 2 now will do enough damage to take out a landing craft. I found the default levels mathematically would never make a difference on preventing a base incursion unless you had 5 or more.

(config.xml)

1. Changed "MoveAP","TurnAP","KneelingAP","KneeledTurnAP" to 1 AP per tile instead of 4. You can now move a fair distance and shoot in the same turn. This makes moving into and out of cover to fire a much more viable option.

2. Changed "LOSAngle" to 120

3. Changed "DefaultViewRange" to 16.

(gameconfig.xml)

1. Raised starting money by double.

2. Lowered new base cost to 250000

3. Upped "longwaveradarrange" to 1500 from 1000. You can track more, but early craft won't always be able to reach the target.

4. Lowered scientist cost to "1000", technician to "750" and soldiers to "500"... this is the 1970s, E-1s only made about $448 a month. While i'd like the ability to have different ranks charge more, there isn't a structure in the game for it.

5. Lowered female soldier % to 5%... again 1970s, Women were not in combat at this time.

6. Raised the "rankPoints" needed to reach upper ranks.

7. Adjusted all difficulty multipliers. Easy = 0.75, Normal = 0.85, veteran = 1.0, superhuman = 1.2. Currently the only thing that was scaling was alien attributes. They now do more damage, are harder to shoot down, and have higher stats on the higher difficulty.

8. Drastically raised the "alienWavePeriod" setting from 4000 to 15000. You can actually get something done between waves now. Though it will slow your progression a bit, and your monthly income increase / decrease will be lessened.

9. Lowered the "minMissionCount" value from 4 to 0. You can now have a wave where nothing happens. However I've upped the "maxMissionCount" to 8 from 6. So it can be anywhere from a relatively easy wave... or a god awful wave.

*note - there are a whole lot of options in this file. I haven't played around with all of them yet.

(manufactures.xml)

1. Lowered all unit costs by a factor of 10. Making money less of a burden on item creation and more on resources of alloys and alenium. Losing a plane now is not the end of the game, and it won't break the bank to replace it.

2. Lowered unit days for all items by half or more. Weapons and armor no longer take weeks or more to build or replace.

(items.xml)

1. Lowered all sell value to reflect changes made in manufactures.xml.

(Vehicles.xml)

1. Increased hitpoints by a factor of 10 across the board.

2. Increased APs by double.

3. Increased armor by double all around.

4. Increased boarding space to 3.

*note - reasoning for this was... they are armored vehicles... 1 shot from anything other than a heavy weapon shouldn't take them out. I also got tired of losing these to pistols. It is now a very viable strategy to use the armored vehicle as moving shield for your soldiers, especially early on. These units also do not rank up, so their low default stats really start to suck later in the game.

(vehicleweapons_gc.xml)

1. lowered fire cost all around. These can now run and gun in the same turn.

2. raised clipsize of the VV.Machinegun to 500.

(weapons.xml and weapons_gc.xml)

1. Raised damage on sniper rifles by 30 on each rank.

2. Significantly increased the range of sniper rifles. (you can actually snipe from very long ranges as long as you can see the target. Putting a sniper on top of a building is viable now)

3. Made numerous changes to machine guns of all ranks. a. lowered damage by 3/4, b. increased clipsize x5. , c. lowered range to less than rifles of their rank.

4. Doubled shotgun ballistic damage. Early on this is a very effective close range weapon, usually a 1 shot kill. Only downside is that the range is very short.

5. Fixed sound delay where guns would animate and sounds would follow after. (from 0.6 to 0.1.)

[Remmy2112]

Most of those changes sound good but, uh... have you uploaded it? I don't see it anywhere in the post to download.

[EvilEngineer]

Nope, not attached. I haven't made the mod portable. Only edited the files directly so the game thinks it's stock. Though I imagine i'm going to have to figure that part out as any update will overwrite my changes.

[lightgemini]

Too many changes to coment them all , but on first sight some things may backfire or break gameplay/balance :

-Hunter armour. You know plasma pistols CANT harm the hunter , and buffing it further makes it even more uber.

-Making actions cost 1 TU. So a soldier can run for 50 tiles. Aliens are going to flee so fast that hunting for last one can be almost hilarous. A 50 tiles per turn reaper charging at you using alien squad sight, you wont have a chance at all against it.

-Droping alien pistols 20 points on accuracy. Its almost a pew pew gun already and nerfing it more wont do nothing but make things more boring.

-Corsairs are not supposed to bring down corvettes/landing ships alone. Mig still fills that role.

-Hunter having far more sight range than all other units. It was like this before and it didnt work. Made it to easy to abuse the "spot & snipe" tactic too overused in the orginal Xcom. This together with aliens being as short sighted as humans unbalances it towards the player too much.

-Why machine guns are less range than rifles? this totally destroys what this weapon is all about and makes it useles as the sniper rifle now does what the MG is supposed to do and it does it far better.

Many other changes are actually good or well though. I specially like the 75% melee chance as it makes it a more tense moment as you pray your soldier will not die.