Hi!
I will never forget the first time when I played the Area 51 mod and first met the phaser android and spent ungodly amounts of ordinance just to take one down and then taking the corpse home for analysis and figuring out their weakness.
I am afraid that the fact that all mods need to hard code their aliens, might reduce the enjoyability of replaying the game.
Is there anyone out there who would be interested in an alien randomizer? Maybe a Python script you run before starting the game, that selects from a pool of different options the final aliens. Maybe you have three different stats + ufopaedia entries for sectoids, and the script choses one and puts it in the mod directory, so you don’t know which one you got when you start the game.
This would of course require multiple meaningful descriptions and meaningful stats for multiple aliens, and probably on a mod-by-mod basis, so I wouldn’t want to do it alone, but if others are interested, I’d be happy to collab on this idea for the basic game or the more popularly appearing added alien species.
Unless of course if something like this already exists and I just missed it, in which case please point me to the direction.