UPDATED: FIXED CRASHES PERTAINING TO ATTEMPTED REMOVAL OF MEDI-KITS, PLEASE UPDATE YOUR VERSION! CHANGES TO MEDI-KIT CURRENTLY PENDING...
Greetings, I had originally made this mod for use of a play through a friend and I were doing of X-Com files a couple of years back. We had always felt the medical items in the base game of X-Com files were underwhelming or perhaps lackluster. Perhaps this was a mainstay issue of the early game medical, however the early game is what we knew so it was the early game that we sought to change. The mod I made we both felt had served us well, however recently I was thinking about making a version better suited towards the balance changes I wanted to see without adding any new items.
There are two three versions of this mod, 1.0 which only changes the item values of the medical items added in X-Com Files (First aid kit, Medic Bag, Healing sprays, ect.) 2.0 which adds a new early game first aid item "Gauze Wraps" and 3.0 which further tweaks the changes in 2.0 to better attempt to balance them, while also adding new sprites and sounds for a couple of the medical items (Stims and Gauze Wraps). The universal changed shared between both 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 are as follows:
Removal of "STR_MEDI_PACK"
Buffs to the "First Aid Kit" and "Medical Bag"
Changes to the "Big First Aid Spray" to give more wound recovery and a higher morale hit
Weight reductions for "Stims" and "Painkillers"
Now for the individual changes of each 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
1.0 has lowered the cost of the healing spray down to 1000 (sell for 600), and it's weight down to 1 (as to match the stims and painkillers weight.)
2.0 has lowered the cost of the healing spray down to 1500 (sell for 750), and it's weight down to 2 (also to match the stims, painkillers and gauze weight.) Healing spray also grants 1 health recovery as well as giving back 5 morale. New item was added: Gauze Wrap, unlocked at the start of the game to compliment stims and painkillers. Shares the same price and weight as the aforementioned stims and painkillers (2 weight, 500 cost 400 sell). Gives it's user one wound recovery and takes five morale on use.
3.0 has lowered the cost of the healing spray down to 2500 (sell for 1000), it's weight also at 2. Gauze wraps have been changed to require both hands to use, making them indirectly cost more TU's due to the requirement of holstering ones weapon to apply to an open wound. To compensate for this, they are only 1 weight to carry, as supposed to the normal 2 of the other one slot healing items. New sounds have been added to using stims, painkillers and gauze wraps (Doom 3, Max Payne, and L4D2 respectively.) Stims are given a new bigob and floorob.
To wrap this up, I think it best to give my reasoning behind the changes I made here. To start, the lowering of weight on all one slot medical items. For 1.0 this is done as to help you fill the spare 1 weight holes in your units inventory with something useful that might often become overlooked in a normal playthrough due to the typical 3 weight cost they normally have. In 2.0 and 3.0 it was changed to 2 weight due to the increasingly usefulness of the items changed barring the gauze wrap, which was kept at 1 weight for 3.0 due to it's new two handed requirement for use.
Continuing on, I changed First aid Kit to instead of only having one uses in healing, stims, and painkillers, I opted to buff it to two uses per healing. With a predictable change like this, I gave the medical bag three uses in healing, stims and painkillers, and decided to flat out remove the medi-pack as keeping it in alongside the medical bag would be redundant. The reason for this was because I felt there nary a reason to ever bother with the first aid kit and medical bag, they were in my eyes completely useless with their low uses combined with the low healing capacity. This coupled with the fact that both the medi-pack and trauma pack are extremely cumbersome while also being the only practical healing items in terms of uses and health recovery, I began to both understand the balance decision, and resent it. What you had was the choice between low healing uses and medium weight, versus medium healing uses and high weight. With these changes, I feel I made the first aid kit useful as a go-to shoulder slot item for the inevitable minor injury your agents might take, and the medic bag a good alternative to the trauma kit for agents that can't hold as much weight, but still need to heal someone.
The price changes to the medical spray can be explained with a simple, I always thought it was ludicrous how much you had to pay for a 3 weight 1 slot self healing item locked behind research that gave no wound healing whats so ever. Mind you, I understand the stats it was given for balancing reasons, however for the price they were asking, I felt it too much and made the changes to it in 1.0 to better accommodate the stims and painkillers. As for it's changes in 2.0, it was done to make it a Gauze Wrap +, with it's only downside being the +1000 price hike and 1 extra weight.
Moving onto the Gauze Wrap in 2.0, it was added to be the pre-research accommodation to the stims and painkillers, complete with it's own custom sprite and sound effect (borrowed from l4d). The question you might ask with an item like the Gauze Wrap is, why take anything else when you have the cheap (500) 1 slot wound recovery item? My answer lies with the fact of it's lack of health recovery, it's morale hit upon use (5), and it's arguably spatially ineffective compared to using medical packs. Because sure, if you took 5 Gauze Wraps, that's 5 fatal wounds you can stop, however, that's 5 slots taken up where as a trauma pack would only take up four, AND the trauma pack gives health recovery as well as stimulants and painkillers.
As for the Big Healing Spray, it came to a matter of wanting to make something unique from the insanely priced, rather boring medical item. I thought to myself, what better way to make it more interesting then to give it an effect no other medical item had, that being 2 wound recovery, and a heavy 15 morale hit per spray. I felt these changes justified it's large asking price and made it feel more like an experimental medical item more so then it already was.
Finally in 3.0 I felt changing the gauze wraps to require two hands to use was a fantastic idea balance wise for a very useful early game medical item. It essentially removed the need for me to bump up the TU cost on actually using the item at cost of you needing to put away and pick back up your weapon, being able to be mitigated depending on how you decide to organize your inventory.
To really make 3.0 feel like a larger update, I decided on adding new sounds for the stims, and painkillers, as well as removing the bandaging sounds from 2.0 and putting it in 3.0 (making the 2.0 gauze use the same generic healing sound as all the other consumable healing items). I also took it upon myself to edit the stims sprite as to differentiate it better from the zephyr serum, as well as to make it look more like a hypodermic needle. I had originally planned to also change the painkillers sprite to look more like a small blister pack from project zomboid, but opted against it failing to produce something that looked even half decent (It also must be said the painkiller sprite is fairly perfect as it is, however my change to the blister pack would have been to make it look less weighty and more like a single use item, rather then swallowing a whole pill bottle somewhat comically).
I understand this wall of text is a mouthful, or better yet an eyeful, but thanks for reading it if you did, and if you didn't, sorry for the hold up. Here are the files, please enjoy and tell me what you think.
