Man... I like this mod, I do, but I have to play a modified custom version, because I'm just that anal about realistic magazine sizes. Otherwise it's just about perfect. I just get weird about things like that, personally. That and the amount of pellets per shot-shell. That kind of irks me too, but still.
I understand that balance is the overriding concern here and not fine realism. Perfectly understandable. Vanilla XCOM really doesn't have enough options for the soldiers they give us. Not enough choices that work with everyone's strengths or weaknesses. This mod solves that, at least partially.
I should note I play on lower difficulties at the moment, and that I'm only as picky as I am with weapons because I know a lot about them. Otherwise the mod is great. It covers a few oversights in the game. My only real problem is the handling of plasma weapons, as far as real stuff. Humankind, or at least the U.S. have had plasma weapons projects since even before the 90's. Not that that'd be enough to use against aliens, of course, but I would assume you could really soup up your own examples of the same technology by having a "proper" example like an alien weapon to reverse engineer to see all the "proper" or "textbook" cases and situations for these weapons to function properly. Maybe you should have a few more steps involved technology-wise to bridge the gap. Like say, a "miniturization" tech tree to cover shrinkage of existing developmental technologies on earth like high-power lasers and railguns, or in the case of alien tech, circumventing what we can't understand with smaller versions of our own technology.
It is our only edge in that fight, to be honest.
In XCOM aliens have the edge in pre-developed tech.
We however are a species that has repurposed things since day one.
If that's our edge, I don't see why alien tech would be quite as off-limits as it is. I would however agree with it being hard to acquire with longer research times that maybe force players to create R&D focused bases to compensate for said long research times.
That said I kind of agree with the human-driven variants of plasma weapons. I will say though that they may not deserve quite the nerf they've been given, raw-power wise. I think if anything, the human plasma weapons should be inaccurate more than weak. If they fire using mental functions, that seems more like an accuracy driven function than a power one.
I dunno, just a few thoughts.
Also some things seem to weigh too much compared to a human corpse. Magazines, stuff like that.
Also on a separate note, I think HWPs would be worth reworking. Namely, the logic that if you're going to the trouble of making one, it'd probably be in either a higher caliber, rate of fire, or armor quality that a soldier armed with the same. I notice they start in "cannon" but realistically, with their small size, they'd be either 5.56 like soldiers, .50 cal for cheapness, 20mm for power, higher for the power of a similarly sized tank, or some similar scheme. All those have bigger magazines and variable power. I dunno. Sometimes attention to detail makes it hard to enjoy games. (or make them enjoyable in my case.)
