Awesome mod! Haven't play played with it, but obviously it isn't balanced as of right now. When I discovered open x-com and modding I immediately turned to making a SM mod.
I only altered the stats of the soldiers (Game tolerates some pretty huge stats for them), but I had a nice RP rule set in my mind.
Soldier stats looked something like this.
Minimum's where mostly unchanged (I tweaked bravery and psy to reflect the conditioning SM's go under, but that 'broke' the early games difficulty a bit too much.
Maximums where doubled or tripled. That was it. I am super new to open x-com, but I found I didn't instantly get "invincible" soldiers of death. However, when they became veterans...
Balance for armor and such worked like this. (This was purely RP and no coding)
0 kills = Initiate => No armor (Perhaps Guardsmen level?)
5 kills = Scout => Light armor
10 kills = Brother => Heavy Armors
Balance for weapons could go two directions
1- Introduce Xeno's from the w40k universe (I would keep the old aliens, for target practice
2- Rescale weapon damage
=2= Here is some quick numbers you could look into.
Points of reference.
-Both sides use Heavy Plasma.
-Muton's feel like an Orc equivalent to me.
-Bolter's feel like they should compare to the auto cannon
Alright, so we start with the bolter. It is going to be the general purpose gun. Always effective, but not TOO effective. If you make it too good, no one will want to use 'heavier' weapons.
I would replace the rifle with the bolter so pick 24 damage (Just saw that it is actually 30, could'a sworn it was 24) instead of 38. You can use the damage type as pretty much whatever, to adjust for difficulty. 24 explosive damage might still mulch up the sectoids pretty bad
So scale autocannon down to 24 as well. A rough number is just divide by two. That is your scale conversion for the whole process
Humie Weapons (Therefore lighter, and easier to hold)
Pistol - 13 dam
Rifle - 15 dam
Autocannon - 24 dam
Rocket - 30 dam
SM weapons - Bolt Pistol, reflecting it's comparable damage to autocannon, is offset by reduced rate of fire and being one-handed. Should have a similar weight to the autocannon. SM weapons shouldn't be carryable by anyone. This is not w40k canon but gameplay balance.
Bolt P - 24
Bolt R - 30
H Bolt - 45
H Rocket - 75
As I finish writing this, I really like the idea of connecting strength to rank. This means a captain would be equivalent to a full brother. Able to don the armor, wield the weapon, etc. However, due to the difficulty of programming it. I would recommend doing what I did.
Just boost the maximum strength, and make it all really heavy. I didn't test it, but I think...
Initial str of 30. Max of 300. results in gaining 20-30 points per 'level'. Strength can be then thought of as training and experience. Can equipment have a bravery requirement? Cause that would fit better... Also be harder to boost than strength.
Sorry for the rambling post. Put a lot of thought into this already. I am totally interested in helping, but I will be limited to light coding work and conceptual stuff (balance, etc).
