Slightly Harder Mod idea

[Sharp]

So I want a bit more of a challenge in OpenXCOM, I feel it's a bit weird that once you have personal armour you actually have more armour then any alien except silacoid and sectopod, once you have power armour and flying armour then only sectopod just has more armour but only a little.

So what I want to do in my mod is have some harder aliens, I could just increase the stats of existing aliens but I thought it might be interesting if there was a power armoured alien, a muton makes more sense, instead of having the fairly puny silicoid and dangerous but easy to kill celatid that there is a new muton terrorist of power armoured muton! Having the same stats as a regular muton soldier but the armour of a power suit! With the huge health there is now a terrifying enemy!

And to make them even more terrifying Psi-Amps will no longer be able to do mind-control but only psi-panic and that takes 50% TU's (unless redv's idea of psi-attacks temporarily costing psi-strength can be worked in). Blaster bombs will be disabled for aliens and humans because they are just pretty broken. I am thinking of having small launchers being able to fire an elerium bomb with maybe the same damage as a high-explosive to still give aliens some explosive power and keep engineers scary while also making medics a force to be reckoned with (not too sure how aliens work with multiple ammo types though, might have to scrap stun at least for aliens)

And finally Sectopods will do 3x3 AoE attacks instead and chyrsallids get more TU! I feel overall these changes will provide a tougher challenge but be a steady increase in difficulty instead of currently which is survive until you get personal armour and plasma rifles and then your pretty much set, psi-control is just the icing on the cake but really once you have personal armour and plasma rifles you don't need much else, with these changes sectoids and floaters are largely unaffected and still fairly easy to take on, snakemen terror becomes more terrifying and mutons even more so, etherals only slightly more terrifying.

Thinking of stealing luke's alien alloy muton https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,737.0.html but would be nice for it to actually look a bit bulkier maybe.

Anyway what do you guys think?

[moriarty]

sounds good to me... while you're at it, maybe you could think of some kind of buff for the incredibly weak early-game terror units. reapers need to be scarier, silacoids need to be more dangerous, and celatids need everything. I'm not sure how exactly, though...

- maybe the silacoids could do some AoE damage, too? they are super-hot, after all. lots of armor, incendiary immunity, a very-short-range AoE incendiary attack?

- the reaper should have a lot more health. based on the autopsy report, it should have approximately the same health as three mutons

- maybe the celatid could be capable of re-spawning? I don't know if it's possible, though... is it possible to spawn pre-primed grenade type items? if so, we could change the celatid body into a "grenade" which "explodes" after a few turns, spawning a (weaker) celatid...

[Sharp]

I was thinking just having power armour muton replace silicoid and celatid instead of addition to. I'm not sure I want to directly affect floaters and sectoids too much, it would make the game harder too buff them but as the game gets harder already with the other races being buffed it might be too much for the player. Reapers as it stands are pretty useless, increasing their health just means it can drag out the mission for longer, could replace reapers with stronger floaters, or maybe just regular floaters but there will be more off them as they will be there on terror missions instead of reapers.

I am also thinking of increasing alien race commander rank armours by 40 across the board to represent alien alloy armour, a trade off for them being stronger will be having a different colour then regular aliens so easy to identify and target, shouldn't be too hard a buff in the game seeing as they will be on battleships and alien bases so should already have enough firepower to deal with them by then.

[Warboy1982]

- maybe the celatid could be capable of re-spawning? I don't know if it's possible, though... is it possible to spawn pre-primed grenade type items? if so, we could change the celatid body into a "grenade" which "explodes" after a few turns, spawning a (weaker) celatid...

very possible. you'd have to add some frames for their death animation, define a new alien type, and set the celatid's special abilities up like a zombie's. one could also use this multiple times to simulate battle damage, like defining a terminator type enemy that you gradually blow chunks of flesh off of, and it gets madder and madder as you do so, until it's just a metallic skeleton with murder in his eyes.

and why make it weaker? xcom needs to die.

[moriarty]

 
wait a minute... that means we can make a zombie apocalypse survival game, right? zombies that, when dead, just rise again after a few turns, and can turn enemies into zombies? ground missions would be a starting area and an exit area, lots of zombies between one and the other, and you have to survive against the relentless hordes... before your ammo runs out... 

[mercy]

In this case zombies must be allowed to be blasted to pieces so they don't get up again.