XCOM 2
Long War Alien Pack
!@#$)(*& Aug 26, 2016 @ 1:53am
Alien Pack Rebalance
Hello,
TL;DR available.

I did the Alien Pack rebalance for my own playthroughs (imo new aliens are mostly great but poorly implemented) and want to share it with you. Basically, it is quite large overhaul aimed at legendary difficulty, however it is more of "vanilla with interesting twist" than "totally new game".

My goals were to make early game comparable to vanilla in difficulty, maybe a little bit harder, and add more difficulty to mid and late game. At the same time I wanted to preserve important "alien moments", i.e. keep vanilla weights high when new important aliens first appear (e.g.muton, archon etc.), and not decrease Advent Captain appearance to much in mid-game when skulljacking him is a consideration.

Total Alien Pack aliens weight in Follower Pool is 20-40% depending on forcelevel and in Leader Pool 10-30% depending on forcelevel (in basic Alien Pack it is even 40-60%).

Gunners are eliminated, since I consider reliable one-shooting soldiers in cover too early in the game a bad design and Gunners do not offer much in terms of interesting new mechanic. Naja appearance is a little bit delayed and large bunches of them will be less common. Stronger versions of basic Viper are eliminated to not increase Alien Pack weight too much and they are not really necessary when other, more interesting strong aliens are present (who would want slightly stronger Viper when one should be fighting muton elites, sectoid commanders, sectopods or andromedons?:) ).

Here is the link to pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/93QTXF23 (updated 20160831)
Just replace current contents of XComGameData_CharacterStats.ini with this. Enjoy:)

It is work in progress (although playtested) and I appreciate your feedback. New versions may appear later.

Have fun:)

TL;DR: Alien Pack rebalance available (less Naja frustration but still hard, especially in mid and late game) - Link: [url]http://pastebin.com/93QTXF23/url] (updated 20160831)
Last edited by !@#$)(*&; Aug 31, 2016 @ 5:51am
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Showing 1-6 of 6 comments
!@#$)(*& Aug 26, 2016 @ 1:58am 
One thing - I use A Better AI mod so I consider some aliens (looking at you Sectoids!) as significantly stronger than they were in Vanilla. Also, I do not use any DLCs.
Last edited by !@#$)(*&; Aug 26, 2016 @ 2:02am
Deacon Ivory Aug 26, 2016 @ 6:02am 
Just an FYI note, DerBK modified the ABA ATE mod because the 'vanilla' LWS AP includes a line that allows 4 of the same alien in a pod, so he reduced it back to 1. It might be worth looking into this, FWIW the loss of the Advent Gunner is no big deal (I lost three soldiers in three turns to one gunner, including a soldier being squeezed by a Viper, all one shot, all in the first month of the game)
Reduviid Aug 27, 2016 @ 7:16pm 
Thanks for the ini! I will start a new playthrough with this next week on vanilla XCOM 2 and I'll let you know how it goes :)
!@#$)(*& Aug 31, 2016 @ 5:52am 
Updated - pastebin link in the original post
Dragon32 Nov 14, 2016 @ 6:02am 
Hey !@#$)(*&, been playing with your rebalance for a little while now (got to May in a Commander game) and I'm really liking it so far.

It's, as you say, vanilla with a Long War twist rather than Long War with a twist of vanilla.
13 RABBITS Dec 8, 2016 @ 4:21pm 
This is awesome! Thank you!
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Showing 1-6 of 6 comments
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