While it can also increase quantity a bit, this also adds for a lot more variety, while retaining quantity. If you have a total of 24 enemy units, divided through 8 ranks, you can now have 24 ranks and customize individually the name, appearance, stats and weapons/items of each unit.
The main question is really how much work you want to spend doing this, and how to properly set up and use the correspondent alienDeployment entry. Because that entry will always require a 24 rank alienRace to work, otherwise the game will crash.
Nah I consider 8 ranks more than enough for normal deployments, besides adding huge races to normal missions would mean not only a lot of work, but also a possibility of collisions... eg. if I add just single 20-units race, I'll have to rework all retal mission craft deployments... Also don't mistake the number of ranks with quantity of aliens - I have deployments up to 33 units, but most of my races usually only have 4-6 types of units. Going in the direction of customization (eg. 4 types of basic enemy soldier mean 20 instead of 5 weapon loadout variants), this could be consider , but a huge pain to actually impelement
@Dioxine, could you do me a favor and identify the units which you are the author? I'm starting to have problems remembering all of the contributions to add to the credits list and I've reused a lot of material from Piratez.
Yeah have a picture
I think they're all units where I've added some significant contribution, either if they're often modified TFTD or Warboy's/Luke83's/wherever they got them from - sprites.
Oh yeah, and Piratez currently stand at 84 types of new enemy & civilian units (counting by spritesheets), plus most of vanilla units (Sectoid, Cyberdisc, Reaper, Chryssalid, Celatid, Ethereal, Sectopod, X-Com unarmored/Personal Armor/Power Suit, Civilians).
EDIT: took the liberty to update the Iron Man armor for release...