I have a beginner question, and I don't think it warrants a new thread, but if I'm wrong, I'll gladly start one.
Probably would have been better to start your own thread.
I got UFO: Enemy Unknown way back when it came on floppies. I have the last version of XCom as well, so I don't think I have versioning problems. What I would like is advice. I want to play again, and I'd like to take advantage of new weapons, new bad guys, new skills, and so on with as little struggle as possible. Could someone recommend mod(s) which would fill the bill? I see there are lots of mods, and I don't want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out which are best together. Is there a big mod pack that someone can recommend?
Thanks!
I haven't sat down and played other mods much but I have some cursory experience with most of the big popular ones.
Final Mod Pack: A huge bundle of all of the old mods, it's jam-packed with tons of content and much of it is in mods that individually are now hard to find because the old mod portal went down and most of the authors no longer maintain those mods. The whole thing is carefully balanced by Solarius Scorch to work together and be very playable. This is probably the most popular openxcom megamod of all time.
The X-Com Files: Solarius Scorch's dedicated megamod. This mod is very content-rich and high-difficulty. It merges the premise behind X-Com with a lot of things from the X-Files fandom. Very good mod.
X-Piratez: Dioxine's total conversion and easily the most popular total conversion in all of openxcom. This mod changes the entire feel of the game into a story taking place hundreds of years into the future after X-Com lost the war and the aliens took over. You play as human-muton hybrid "mutants" taking up the pirate life as a means to thrive in this post-apocalyptic hellscape. The mod is quite difficult and features a lot of women displaying innocence toward their own sexuality.
Area 51: Hobbes' megamod and one of the most popular mods back in the day. I don't think it has changed much lately. The mod expands upon the idea of X-Com and toys with elements from Men In Black and other alien invasion fiction. It's a very popular and very intricate mod, pretty difficult but a lot of fun.
From the Apocalypse: Robin's total conversion trying to create the X-Com: Apocalypse experience within openxcom. The game takes place in the same timeline as X-Com: Apocalypse and deals with the same aliens and corporations, plus more. Everything looks and feels a lot like Apocalypse. Definitely recommended for any Apocalypse fans.
UNEXCOM: One of efrenespartano's two megamods set somewhat in the same universe. This one imagines an alien invasion taking place during the Cold War. You play as a United Nations group battling impossible odds to save the world, and you must struggle to ally with NATO, the USSR, and the USA in order to share valuable technology and scientific advancements to aid you in your quest to save the world. The mod is fairly playable but still in development and will see a lot of changes going forward.
The Great War of the Worlds: The second megamod from efrenespartano. This mod has aliens attacking Earth during World War 1 (and later, World War 2 in an expansion) and in order to save the planet you must dig into secret research projects in order to have any hope of contending with the extremely advanced alien technology. This mod draws inspiration from Mars Attacks as well as several hypothetical technology myths from the industrial age such as Phlogiston weapons, thus it has somewhat of a campy feel to it. This mod is also in development and will see many changes going forward.
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Above are the biggest mods which really transform the gameplay experience. Below are mods with a more subtle impact, leaving the gameplay familiar and similar to the original.
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Reaver's Faithful: My own megamod which makes a large number of small changes and adds a small amount of content in order to fill holes in the game as I see them. Not everyone likes my changes, but people tend to agree that my mod is rather well balanced. It focuses on removing the idea of constantly upgrading, and instead grouping things into technology tiers: at each tier there are several viable options and the player has freedom to choose their favored path of gameplay. You will always be presented with options that are all viable but play differently, for example one of your starter interceptors is faster and can fly farther, but the other one has more hit points and can carry more weapons.
Hardmode Xcom: Hellrazor's megamod which is all about increasing the difficulty of the game. Some new content has been added in order to provide more opportunities for strategy, especially in the starting technology. Everything is designed around raising the skill floor of the game (harder to win) while also raising the skill ceiling (takes more skill to play the best possible). In terms of actual difficulty, it is much more difficult than the vanilla game but actually several other mods are similarly difficult or even more difficult. Recently, Hellrazor has come back to developing his mod and may yet increase the difficulty even higher. His mod is also notable for streamlining functionality, removing excess details that don't need to be there. Each item does one or two things, and it's easy to understand how everything works by looking at it.
X-Com Classic Remastered: Coincident's megamod seeking to balance the original game and increase difficulty. It doesn't really add much content, but rebalances existing things and makes you fight a LOT more aliens. Very high difficulty, and perhaps the closest you'll get to vanilla in a megamod.
Awesomeguns: CanadianBeaver's megamod mostly focused on increasing variety of things and also updating the images and sounds to look and feel better. The difficulty of the game is greatly increased as well, and you will find yourself fighting large numbers of aliens on the battlescape. This mod is also notable for maintaining compatibility with openxcom version 1.0, which is so old that its file system isn't even compatible with modern openxcom. The purpose for this was based on the idea that version 1.0 would maintain a set standard, which was its original intent, but time has shown that that didn't pan out very well. These days the version issues are so well ironed out that we don't really experience version conflicts as long as your openxcom is up to date.
It should also be noted that several mods (Awesomeguns included) have maintained compatibility with basic openxcom (not using openxcom extended). This was done originally for fear of compatibility conflicts, but again, time has shown us that we can use OXC and OXCE features interchangeably without issue. Awesomeguns is designed for OXC 1.0; Reaver's Faithful is designed for modern OXC; many old mods simply lack OXCE features because of their age. Mods designed for OXCE should run in OXC, but their OXCE features won't activate, often completely disrupting the balance of gameplay.
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Below are mods which do not fit into the above categories.
The World of Terrifying Silence: A Terror From The Deep megamod by Nord, and currently the only fully developed and highly popular TFTD megamod in our community. This mod expands on the original concept of TFTD in a manner similar to Hobbes' Area 51, this mod taking cues from the Cthulhu mythos and other underwater fantasy. Very fun, very difficult, very popular.
40k: A total conversion by Ryskeliini, bulletdesigner, and ohartenstein23 that takes place completely outside of the X-Com universe and instead within the Warhammer universe. You play as Force Commander of the Imperium of Man, and the gameplay takes a lot of cues from the Soviet Union and puts them into a futuristic world where you're the weaklings struggling to fight off hordes of extremely powerful marauding forces trying to conquer your world. Very high quality mod which has large amounts of its own original content (based on the Warhammer 40k universe).
There are other megamods and total conversions out there, but these are the ones I am familiar with. You can download most of these and many smaller mods on the
openxcom mod portal. While the mod portal has quite a few mods, the majority of mods within the community are not currently on the portal. Many were on the old mod portal (some of which have since been rescued), and several others (such as From the Apocalypse) are available on the forums here.
As to your original question, I would encourage you to select based on these descriptions, or check some mods out on YouTube or Twitch to see how you like them before you play them. But if you want a quick recommendation, and you're looking for basically X-Com but more stuff, I'm gonna go with recommending Final Mod Pack. If you're worried about game difficulty, then you can either cheat (editing save files is easy once you get the hang of it, use Notepad++), or Reaver's Faithful has a large variance between difficulty settings, so Beginner is quite easy to play. Also if you feel that Final Mod Pack adds too many features and you want something in-between that and vanilla, several other mods such as Reaver's Faithful or Area 51 can fill that niche. And my upcoming mod Harmony will have way more features than Faithful (but way less than Final Mod Pack) and should be releasing within a few months.
If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to ask here or create a new thread! We're a friendly community who wants to help you enjoy the game! Also, if you do play it, we'd love to hear about it in the playthroughs forum!
